The Taxonomy of Italian Psych Verbs and the Causative/Anticausative Alternation

In this paper I present a taxonomy of Italian psych verbs based on a lexical resource of 321 verbs in 6 classes and 5 subclasses. Psych verbs are analysed according to the syntactic position of their arguments, the distribution of the prepositions they govern, and the causative/anticausative alternation. The data show that the causative/anticausative alternation and its encoding types is a widespread phenomenon within psych verbs. Numerous Object Experiencer verbs alternate between a causative and an anticausative construction in exactly the same way as non-psych verbs like rompere ‘break’. By taking analytical causatives into consideration, I show that the causative/anticausative alternation may also concern Subject Experiencer nontransitive verbs. The taxonomy highlights the prominence of the Accusative Object Experiencer psych verb pattern in the lexicon, while also pointing out the paucity of non-transitive psych verbs and their heterogeneous behaviour.