Transformational approach to psych verbs: evidence from Turkish

Abstract

Psychological verbs have two surface mapping structures: experiencer-theme (fear type) and theme-experiencer (frighten type). These verbs are undeniably semantically related and their having different mapping structures poses counterevidence for the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). Psych verbs also have idiosyncratic binding behaviors, which are again counterevidence for the Binding Theory. Bulk of this paper deals with the problematic behaviors of psych verbs and tries to merge semantic and syntactic approaches under the rubric of syntactic derivation. In doing so, the paper will also classify the Turkish data in terms of derivability.