Syntactic characteristics of emotive predicates in B ulgarian: A corpus-based study (2022)

Abstract: The paper presents a corpus-based study of emotive predicates (verbs and predicative constructions with adjectival, adverbial or noun phrases) in Bulgarian with respect to their syntactic characteristics. The sources of empirical data analyzed here are Bulgarian National Corpus, Corpus of Bulgarian Political and Journalistic Speech and Bulgarian part of Multilingual Comparable Corpora of Parliamentary Debates ParlaMint. The analyzes are organized in terms of morpho-syntactic features of emotive predicates, transitivity, syntactic functions and theta-roles of their arguments. Emotive predicates denote a state or an event involving an affective experience. As part of the special semantic class of psychological/Experiencer verbs, they have been studied in relation to the interaction between lexical semantics and argument realization. Bulgarian data confirm the well-established division of Psych predicates into three classes: Subject Experiencer (fear type verbs), Object Experiencer (frighten type verbs), Dative Experiencer. The third class is mostly represented by adverbial predicates.

## introduction the main topic of this study is the syntactic realization of arguments to verbal predicates and predicative constructions in bulgarian expressing positive emotions. the analysis will not be restricted to emotive verbs only, but will represent adjectives, adverbs, or nouns used in constructions which meaning corresponds to the category of the positive emotions. the objectives of empirical data analyzes are to compare the syntactic structure of two types of sentences -with verbal or with adjectival, adverbial or nominal predicates. the focus of our observations is related to the question whether the argument structure of emotional verbs is "inherited" by the corresponding adjectives, adverbs or nouns. special attention will be paid to the syntactic realization of the central participant in the emotional scenario marked by the semantic role of experiencer. the sources of empirical data analyzed in this paper are bulgarian national corpus ( http://dcl.bas.bg/bulnc/ ; @xcite , corpus of bulgarian political and journalistic speech ( http://political.webclark.org ; @xcite and bulgarian part of multilingual comparable corpora of parliamentary debates parlamint ( https://www.clarin.eu/resourcefamilies/parliamentary-corpora; @xcite . in this article we provide statistic data only from bulgarian national corpus. the observations are organized in terms of morpho-syntactic features of emotive predicates, transitivity, syntactic functions and theta-roles of their arguments. first, the structure of sentences with emotive verbs veselya (rejoice), zabavlyavam (entertain), radvam (make someone happy; glad), and their reflexive counterparts veselya se, zabavlyavam se, radvam se will be discussed. then the results of analyses will be compared with the features of sentences with adjectival, adverbial and nominal constructions with vesel (joyful), zabaven (amusing), radosten (joyful; happy); veselo (joyfully), zabavno (funny), radostno (happily); veselba (merriment), zabava (entertainment), radost (joy). the choice of these particular lexemes is motivated by the fact that two verbs and not just one signify the feeling, as is the case with strahuvam se (fear). on the other hand, the group of emotive predicates includes adjectives, adverbs, and nouns corresponding to the verbs of emotion. ## emotional scenario emotions are mental processes reflecting the experiences, perceptions, and evaluations associated with a particular object or specific stimulus. according to @xcite , all natural languages have lexical means for expressing conceptualized notions of emotional states, evaluations and attitudes. lexical semantics of the elements from the emotional lexicon provides the relational and semantic frameworks for syntactic structures used to denote different types of emotions. apart from subject who can feel or sense something (experiencer), an element of evaluation is present in the emotional scenario. for the predicates under consideration in our work, it is an evaluation of what is happening by the experiencer as something positive for him or her. this evaluation, in turn, is a stimulus for the positive emotion; stimulus affects the experiencer, changing or maintaining his/her emotions. this general scenario specifies the possible syntactic structures of the sentences with emotive predicates. causative verbs like veselya (rejoice), zabavlyavam (entertain), radvam (make someone happy) are two-argument predicates. the stimulus (cause) and the experiencer must be presented in the sentence. with reflexives veselya se, zabavlyavam se, radvam se only one element of the emotional scenario is necessary to be expressed. since the emotion is conceptualized and separated from its stimulus this argument will represent the experiencer. ## psychological (experiencer) verbs emotive predicates are part of a larger group of predicates called mental predicates, affective verbs @xcite @xcite . psych verbs are a class of verbs defined not only by their lexical semantics, but also by the semantic properties of the sentences they function in. as @xcite first stated, "verbs expressing psychological states have a uniform θ-grid, involving an experiencer, the individual experiencing the mental state, and a theme, the content or object of the mental state" @xcite . the second role is more often called stimulus. three subtypes of psych verbs are defined based on their lexical semantics: verbs of perception (see, hear), verbs of cognition (know) and verbs of emotion (fear, frighten). emotive predicates, on the other hand, "fall into two grammatically distinct classes: those whose subject is the animate experiencer and whose object (if there is one) is the source (fear, miss, adore, love, despise); and those whose object is the animate experiencer and whose subject is the source (amuse, charm, encourage, anger)" @xcite . most of the emotive verbs in bulgarian can be used with short reflexive pronoun se (self), e.g. radvamradvam se, plashaplasha se. in this case, se is marker for middle voice construction and does not indicate reflexiveness (cf. asenova and guentchéva 2022), it occupies the direct object position and those verbs could have only pp or a complement clause as their second argument. in these cases, the difference between verb groups (fear-type with subject experiencer and frightentype with object experiencer) is also marked by the use of short reflexive pronoun se. ## types of constructions with adjectives, adverbs, or nouns the constructions whose meaning correspond to the meaning of the verbs for positive emotions denote an emotional state. they have the same argument structure as the verbs of emotion -the experiencer and the stimulus.