"Orhiko xoria Orhin lakhet": izen/adjektibo psikologikoak, gai lokatiboak eta predikazio

Abstract

Starting from Belleti & Rizzi's (1988) work, there has been a great progress in the understanding of psych predicates, but not as much on the predication involving psych adjectives and nouns. Adger & Ramchand's (2006) work on Scottish Gaelic is one exception. In this language, there are nouns that express psych states, and the experiencer and theme arguments are shown as prepositional arguments of these nouns. In Basque too, there are psych nouns, such as laket, and they are found with postpositional phrases that are interpreted as the themes of the psychological state expressed by the predicate. The experiencer, on the other hand, can occur either with absolutive case, ergative case or dative case. In this paper, we show that, like in Scottish Gaelic, the locative theme forms a constituent together with the psych noun in Basque. On the contrary, the experiencer does not belong to this constituent, as it is introduced by a functional head that is higher than the Pred(ication) phrase (Bowers 1993). In the case of the dative experiencer, it is introduced by an Applicative head —either Possession Appl (Adger & Ramchand 2008) or a High Appl (Pylkkänen 2002)—. The ergative, in contrast, is introduced by Voice (Kratzer 1996, Berro 2015). We dedicate this work to professor Joakin Gorrotxategi. We do not work in the same scientific fields, but leaving aside the differences from one another, language is a wonderland for the three of us. As the saying goes, «a leopard cannot change its spots».