Transitivity and structural case marking in psych verbs: A fragment of an HPSG grammar of Spanish

This dissertation presents evidence from Spanish which shows that case marking is structural for psych verbs, against the common assumption that it is inherent (lexically stipulated) as proposed in Belletti and Rizzi (1988). An account is offered of the alternation of case marking--accusative/dative--that is possible with psych predicates as in: (a) A la ministra *0/le/la preocuparon las noticias. (To the minister Clitic *0/DAT/ACC worried the news-NOM); (b) Las noticias 0/le/*la preocuparon a la ministra. (The news-NOM CLITIC 0/DAT/*ACC worried to the ministert-DAT/ACC.).;The evidence shows when accusative marking is obligatory, when dative is possible and why dative is more common than accusative with these verbs. It also explains why dative marking applies when structural accusative is expected with two-place predicates. An account is offered of when clitic doubling--dative as well as accusative--is obligatory, when it is optional, and why the optional rule is applied more often than not. The analysis proposed is shown to apply not only to Romance languages but also to other language families.;The explanation rests on a proposal to include as part of the grammar of natural languages a rule advanced in this dissertation that is called the Rule of Dative Overriding of the Accusative (Dative Overriding). This rule states roughly that human object NPs of monotransitive verbs tend to get dative marking instead of accusative.;Dative overriding allows one to propose a simple, yet more predictable characterization of transitivity. Transitive verbs are verbs which can assign accusative to their first objects, but that can also assign dative (when the object NP is as high or higher in the animacy hierarchy than the subject). Dative overriding accounts for the dative marking common in verbs of feeling or emotion (psych verbs). It also offers an explanation for the dialectal variation in Spanish sentences like those in: (a) ques Viste a Jorge ayer? (Did you see George yesterday?); (b) Si lo/le ACC/DAT vi en su oficina. (Yes, him I saw in his office.).