Experiencer marking in emotion complex predicates in Spanish

Abstract

Spanish verbal predicates of emotion composed by the sequence V+N, like dar gusto (lit. ‘give joy’) or tener miedo (lit. ‘have fear’) were examined in order to determine if the syntactic function (subject or non-subject) shown by the experiencer has a correlation with the lexical aspect of the compound, similar to what happens in emotion lexical verbs, such correlation is predicted by a typological claim based on the verb semantic type (stative, causative or inchoative). It was found that the prediction is fulfilled. An inventory of around 450 compounds of this sort is also presented.