A Cognitive Approach To English Causative Psychological Verbs

This dissertation investigates English causative psychological verbs within cognitive theory.Three theoretical accounts for the linking behaviour of psychological verbs are reviewed:the finer-grained syntax account of Belletti and Rizzi(1988),the thematic and aspectual account of Grimshaw(1990),the finer-grained semantics account of Pesetsky (1995).And also,the account of zero morpheme CAUS and the account of Bouchard,the linguistic research on causative psychological verbs are reviewed.For Belletti and Rizzi(1988),no difference exists between ES and EO verbs at the level of D-structure.However,the two types of verbs differ from each other at the level of S-structure.For ES verbs,nothing happens at the S-structure.Thus,ES verbs behave just like any other regular transitive verbs.As for EO verbs,the Theme moves to the subject position in the S-structure.For Grimshaw(1990),ES psychological verb has the Experiencer mapped onto the subject position because the Experiencer argument is maximally prominent on both thematic and aspectual tiers.However,EO psychological verb has the Theme(realized as CAUSE) mapped onto the subject position because there is a conflict of the two tiers.Pesetsky(1995) claims different theta-grids for the two types of psychological verbs:the object with ES psychological verb is Target or Subject Matter; while the subject with EO verb is Causer.Pesetsky also proposes a bimorphemic analysis of EO verbs.That is,verbs like amuse contain a verb root√amuse and a zero causative morpheme CAUS.On the basis of the former research on causative psychological verbs,this dissertation demonstrates the classification,argument analysis from different readings.And that,the analysis of semantic features and event structure of English causative psychological verbs would be illustrated.Under the framework of figure-ground theory,this dissertation answers the question "how could people express and profile their emotion in different degree?" by adopting the cognitive approach.