From Impersonal to Pronominal Psychological Verbs
A Comparative Study of Latin and Catalan
Abstract
Latin impersonal psychological verbs, whose experiencer in the accusative case is hierarchically prominent over the stimulus in the genitive case, involve stative causative constructions. A null A(mbient)-Causer pronoun is posited to act as their external argument. In the transition from Latin to Romance languages such as Catalan the reflexive pronoun was grammaticalized as a middle marker, which attracted verbs to the personal construction. We show that Lat. non-agentive impersonal psychological verbs correspond to Cat. anticausatives, whereas more agentive ones correspond to autocausatives.
open access | peer reviewed
Presentato: 14 Marzo 2025 | Accettato: 04 Settembre 2025 | Pubblicato 29 Aprile 2026 | Lingua: en
Keywords Latin • Impersonal psychological verbs • Autocausatives • Catalan • Anticausatives
Copyright © 2026 Jaume Mateu, Carles Royo. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-962-7/004