Datives with psych nouns and adjectives in Basque

1 Introduction

Most studies of predicative psych expressions focus on verbs; studies of psych nouns and adjectives are rare. Belletti and Rizzi (1988) proposed a three-way classification of psych verbs which has been widely used in the literature. The three types are temere ‘fear’ (I), preoccupare ‘worry’ (II), and piacere ‘please’ (III). This three-way typology is illustrated for Italian in (1):

In this typology, the experiencer and stimulus thematic roles (or ‘theme’ in Belletti and Rizzi’s terms) are expressed by different grammatical relations and, thus, marked differently for each class in languages with overt nominal case. With Class I verbs (temere ‘fear’), the experiencer is the subject and takes nominative case, whereas the stimulus is the object and takes accusative case. With Class II verbs (preoccupare ‘worry’), the stimulus is the subject and takes nominative case, whereas the experiencer is the object and takes accusative case. Lastly, with Class III verbs (piacere ‘please’), the experiencer is the subject and takes the dative, whereas the stimulus is assigned nominative case.

Many languages in the world can be described with the three-way typology of psych-verbs proposed by Belletti and Rizzi (1988): French (Ruwet 1993); German (Haiden 2005); Greek (Anagnostopoulou 1999); Hebrew (Arad 1998, 1999; Landau 2009); Icelandic (Barðdal 1999, 2001); Italian (Belletti and Rizzi 1988); and Spanish (Franco 1992), among many others – see especially Landau (2009) and references there.

Basque also fits in this typology of psych verbs although the case frames of Class I and Class II psych predicates involve ergative and absolutive case rather than nominative and accusative; Class III involves dative and absolutive (rather than nominative). See Etxepare (2003: 403–411) and Fernández and Ortiz de Urbina (2010: 75–107) for a description. The three classes are exemplified in (2). It is worth noting that, Basque being a language with auxiliary alternation,^[1] Classes I and II select the transitive auxiliary *edun ‘have’, whereas Class III selects the intransitive auxiliary izan ‘be’. Moreover, because Basque exhibits agreement with the arguments marked by the ergative, absolutive and dative cases, Classes I and II show ergative and absolutive agreement on the transitive auxiliary, whereas Class III shows absolutive and dative agreement in the intransitive one. (In order to illustrate Class I, we have substituted gorrotatu ‘hate’ for temere.)

The case frame and agreement patterns attested with Basque psych verbs are summarized in Table 2:

In addition, Basque is particularly interesting because many psychological events or states are expressed by means of nouns or adjectives. Some of the structures involving nouns and adjectives are similar to those with Classes I and III verbs in Belletti and Rizzi’s typology.

In (3a), the noun gorroto ‘hate/hatred’ occurs instead of its verbal counterpart gorrotatu ‘hate’ (Class I). Still, the same case frame is attested, namely ergative experiencer and absolutive stimulus, transitive copula and ergative-absolutive agreement pattern. Note that the noun gorroto shows no aspectual morphemes, such as the imperfective morpheme t(z)en, which is available with its verbal counterpart gorrotatu ‘hate’ in (2a). In turn, (3b) shows the same pattern attested with Class III verbs (piacere ‘please’): dative experiencer and absolutive stimulus, along with their corresponding dative and absolutive agreement in the intransitive copula. However, this example shows the noun or adjective atsegin ‘pleasure/pleasant’ instead of the verb gustatu ‘please’ (exemplified above in [2c]). Note that the very same noun/adjective atsegin ‘pleasure/pleasant’ can also appear in the pattern corresponding to Class I, i.e., it behaves like gorroto ‘hate’. This is illustrated in (4):

We find that Basque psych noun and adjectives show counterparts of Belletti and Rizzi’s Classes I and III only; there is no nominal/adjectival counterpart to Class II verbs. Nevertheless, Basque psych noun/adjectives show three other configurations not considered in Belletti and Rizzi’s typology.

First, if we focus on structures involving datives, a pattern converse to that found with Class III verbs (piacere ‘please’) is attested, i.e., with an absolutive experiencer and a dative stimulus:

Second, Basque also shows two kinds of structures combining ergative and dative arguments. The first is a transitive structure involving an ergative experiencer and a dative stimulus, a case frame unattested in Belletti and Rizzi’s typology. In fact, the Basque counterpart to the Italian psych verb temere ‘fear’ corresponds to this particular ergative-dative configuration:

This structure includes a copula that shows not only absolutive and ergative agreement but also dative agreement, thereby resembling a ditransitive structure.^[2]

The second structure is the mirror image of the previous one, i.e., a transitive structure with an ergative stimulus and a dative experiencer, as in (7):

Therefore, Belletti and Rizzi’s typology must be extended in order to consider psych nouns/adjectives attested in Basque. In fact, there are many other languages where psychological events/states are expressed by means of nouns or adjectives instead of verbs. Adger and Ramchand (2006) analyze psych nouns in Scottish Gaelic and propose that experiencers can relate to them in two ways and are therefore of two types: with intransitive predicates – involving a single argument, e.g., in tha cùram orm [is anxiety on.me] ‘I am anxious’ – the experiencer is a locative adpositional phrase; with transitive predicates – involving two arguments, e.g., in tha gaol agam ort [is love at.me on.you] ‘I love you’ – the experiencer is a locative adpositional phrase that also expresses possessors. Ingason (2016) has shown for Icelandic that a dative experiencer or benefactive can be introduced together with event-denoting nouns. Finally, in Basque, Berro and Fernández (2019) have explored the interaction between event-denoting nouns/adjectives and dative arguments, and have proposed that goal datives and experiencer datives are syntactically different.

In the present paper, we analyze the syntactic behavior of different predicative configurations involving psych nouns/adjectives in Basque and propose a classification in the light of Belletti and Rizzi’s typology of psych verbs. In Section 2, we describe the four patterns attested in Basque with psych nouns/adjectives. In Section 3, we briefly discuss the categorial status of the psych word involved in the intransitive structures. Sections 4 and 5 explore the relevant morphosyntactic details of the intransitive and transitive constructions under scrutiny, respectively. Section 6 discusses some of the consequences of our study and propose an extended typology of psych predicates. Finally, Section 7 presents the main conclusions of the study.

2 Psych nouns/adjectives in Basque and predication

Basque shows different structures involving psych nouns and adjectives. In these structures, a dative argument can be either the experiencer or the stimulus of the psychological state denoted by the psych noun/adjective, as can be seen in the intransitive examples (8a) and (8b):

The psych predicates in (8a–b) differ from prototypical psych verbs in Basque in that they do not combine with aspectual suffixes and still have an imperfective aspectual interpretation.^[4]

The structures in (8a–b) are similar to each other in two respects. First, both involve two arguments, i.e., the experiencer and the stimulus of the psychological state denoted by the psych noun/adjective. Second, both include the intransitive copula izan ‘be’ that cross-references the experiencer and the stimulus. There is a significant difference between them, however, as the experiencer (ni ‘I’) is marked by the dative case suffix -(r)i and its corresponding agreement morpheme in (6a) whereas the same case along with its agreement mark the stimulus (hizkuntza-ri ‘to the language’) in (6b). We will refer to the former configuration as DatExpIS (8a) and to the latter as DatStimIS (8b).

Basque has also transitive counterparts of these constructions:

These structures differ from those in (8) in that the non-dative argument is in the ergative instead of the absolutive. Moreover, unlike in (8), a transitive copula, known in Basque linguistics as *edun ‘have’, is selected. This copula cross-references both the dative and the ergative arguments; the dative experiencer occurs with an ergative stimulus in (9a), and the dative stimulus occurs vis-à-vis an ergative experiencer in (9b). An unmarked third-person singular absolutive is also morphologically involved in the copula, but this does not correspond to any argument in the clause.

In this paper, we present these structures and explore how the dative argument (either experiencer or stimulus) behaves both morphologically and syntactically. As we will see, although the experiencer and the stimulus share case and agreement morphological specifics in the intransitive structure, they behave in an opposite way regarding dative agreement alternation, constituency, hierarchy, and selection. On the other hand, in the transitive structure, the behavior of the stimulus and the experiencer is similar regarding constituency but not dative agreement alternation.

The psych noun and adjectives we address here are listed in Table 3.

3 Double categorial status: Nouns or adjectives

The categorial status of the psych predicates under analysis is controversial. They do not behave like verbs since they do not take aspectual suffixes as verbs do in Basque, and it is also unclear whether they are strictly nominal or adjectival. The items with double nominal/adjectival behavior in Basque are, among others: atsegin ‘pleasure, pleasant’, gaitzi ‘resentment, hateful’ (formal), higuin ‘abhorrence, disgusting’, laket ‘pleasure, pleasant’, and neke ‘fatigue, tired’. Other items involved in those structures are only nouns, such as irudi ‘image’ and plazer ‘pleasure’. It is worth noting that in Scottish Gaelic and Icelandic, only psych nouns have been attested in predicative constructions (Adger and Ramchand 2006; Ingason 2016).

Let us zoom in on atsegin ‘pleasure, pleasant’. In three contemporary Basque dictionaries (Elhuyar, Egungo Euskararen Hiztegia (EEH) [Dictionary of Contemporary Basque] (Sarasola 2008), and Nola erran (NE) [French-Basque Dictionary] (Oyharçabal 2009–2013)), the lexical entry atsegin is characterized both as a noun and an adjective because it may behave like either a noun or an adjective. On the one hand, as a noun, atsegin combines with elements that usually occur with nouns, such as determiners, adpositional modifiers and adjectives. For instance, in (10a-b), atsegin is modified by an adpositional phrase headed by relational -ko ‘of’ (in [10a], it additionally occurs with a determiner); in these examples, the nominal phrases headed by atsegin act as direct objects of the verbs. Finally, in (10c), atsegin is combined with the adjective handi ‘big’

Categorially unambiguous psych nouns occur in similar contexts. For instance, irudi ‘image’ is modified by the adjective irribarretsu ‘smiling’ in (11a), and plazer ‘pleasure’ is headed by the demonstrative determiner horren ‘of that’ in (11b):

On the other hand, atsegin can also behave like an adjective. It can be modified by degree adverbs such as oso ‘very’ (12a) and it can take the comparative suffix -ago (12b) and the superlative suffix -en (12c):

As mentioned above, this kind of categorial variation extends to other psych nouns that can occur in the configuration depicted in (8a). In particular, the variation found in laket ‘pleasure, pleasant’ has been analyzed in Fernández and Berro (2018). See also Zuñiga and Fernández (to appear) for a discussion of laket in relation to (lexically constrained) antipassives. Additionally, the predicate zordun ‘debtor, indebted’ belonging to the leial-type is also considered a noun and an adjective in Elhuyar, but only an adjective in EEH. We have only found instances of the nominal use in the corpora, e.g., the one in (13):

Other predicates of the leial-type (leial itself, as well as fidel ‘faithful, loyal’ and eskerdun ‘grateful’) are considered adjectival in the dictionaries. In fact, only adjectival and predicative uses are attested in the corpora, e.g., examples like (14):

As can be seen, in (13) the noun zordun ‘debtor’ occurs with a determiner and is dative-marked. In (14), on the other hand, eskerdun ‘grateful’ behaves as an adjective and modifies the noun malko ‘tear’.

Note that, unlike atsegin ‘pleasure/pleasant’, most of these psych predicates have a verbal counterpart with similar meaning. For instance, gaitzi ‘resentment, hateful’ (formal) has gaitzitu ‘hate’; higuin ‘abhorrence, disgusting’ has higuindu; laket ‘pleasure, pleasant’ can be paired with laketu, and finally, irudi ‘image’ has the verbal version iruditu ‘seem’. The noun/adjective neke ‘fatigue, tired’ also has a parallel verb nekatu, although the latter has a different syntactic configuration and different aspectual semantics, i.e., it is eventive (‘get tired’) rather than stative (‘being tired’) (see also Section 5.1 for the verbal counterparts of the psych nouns/adjectives occurring in transitive structures). In this paper, we leave aside these verbal predicates and focus on their nominal and adjectival counterparts.

4 Dative experiencer vs. dative stimulus: Exploring asymmetries in intransitive constructions

This section explores several asymmetries between the dative arguments in the intransitive constructions. We first report on possible alternations regarding case frames Section 4.1) and agreement patterns (Section 4.2). Then we apply to Basque some tests previously applied by Adger and Ramchand (2006) to Scottish Gaelic regarding constituency (Section 4.3), hierarchy (Section 4.4), and selection (Section 4.5).

5 Dative experiencer and dative stimulus in transitive constructions

The other two structures involving psych nouns in Basque involve transitive clauses. Unlike the main structures presented in (1), they do not select the intransitive copula izan ‘be’ but the transitive *edun ‘have’. Besides, these two transitive structures in (9) (reproduced as (46) below) are mirror images of each other. In (46a), the experiencer takes dative case and the stimulus appears in the ergative (DatExpTS); in (46b), the stimulus takes dative case while the experiencer appears in the ergative (DatStimTS):

In both structures, the experiencer and the stimulus are cross-referenced by their corresponding dative and ergative agreement markers on the inflected copula. (With ergatives other than a 3sg, non-zero segmental material appears on the copula.) As for the unmarked third-person singular absolutive in the inflection, it does not correspond to any argument in either of the two structures.

Psych nouns that occur in the DatExpTS structure in (46a) are not numerous and seem to be semantically related to each other: ardura ‘care, worry’; axola ‘care, worry’; berdin, lit. ‘same; matter’ (also in its reduplicated form berdin-berdin, lit. ‘same-same; matter’); igual, lit. ‘same; matter’; and inporta ‘matter’. Examples from the EPG corpus are given in (47):

Conversely, psych nouns occurring in the DatStimTS are more numerous and include amorru ‘anger’, beldur ‘fear’, enpagu ‘abhor’ (western Basque), gorroto ‘hatred’, inbidia ‘envy’, izu ‘terror’, mania ‘abhor’, and nazka ‘repulsion, revulsion’. We present some examples from the EPG corpus in (48):

In this section, we explore the behavior of the dative experiencer and the dative stimulus in the transitive structures. We begin by describing the verbal counterparts to these psych nominals Section 5.1). Next, we compare the behavior of the dative arguments in these transitive constructions applying the tests explored in the intransitive ones: dative-ergative alternation (Section 5.2.1), hierarchy (Section 5.2.2), selection (Section 5.2.3), dative agreement alternations (Section 5.2.4) and constituency Section 5.2.5).

6 Typology of psych nouns/adjectives: Extending Belletti and Rizzi’s classification

So far, the syntactic tests indicate that we can distinguish four types of psych nouns/adjectives in Basque. On the one hand, those that have a dative and an absolutive argument, that is, psych nouns/adjectives occurring in intransitive structures can clearly be differentiated in two groups. In fact, apart from their different theta-role distribution, they also exhibit very different syntactic behavior as shown in Section 3. On the other hand, the psych nouns occurring in transitive structures, that is, those taking an ergative and a dative argument, also seem to belong to two different classes. Although they behave similarly in some tests, they do contrast regarding constituency and, to a certain extent, in dative-agreement drop and hierarchy (as well as for their thematic configuration).

The inclusion of psych nouns/adjectives instead of verbs enriches Belletti and Rizzi’s three-way classification of psych predicates. On the one hand, Class I (temere ‘fear’) and Class III (piacere ‘like’) have nominal/adjectival counterparts in Basque, exemplified in (3a) and (3b), respectively. However, no nominal/adjectival counterpart has been attested in Class II (preoccupare ‘worry’) for reasons that are not entirely clear to us. On the other hand, DatStimIS does not correspond to any class of Belletti and Rizzi’s typology, and additionally, the appearance of an ergative-marked argument gives rise to psych structures that combine ergative and dative in a way that is unattested in accusative languages such as Italian and many of the languages that have been explored in order to analyze psychological events and states. Our new classification of psych predicates is presented in Table 8 below. This table is an extension of Table 2.

A matter worth exploring is whether the patterns observed in Basque are also observed in other languages with ergative case and ergative agreement patterns. In fact, the presence or absence of the ergative is interesting per se since it raises interesting questions about its nature. For instance, why does a case mainly but not exclusively associated with agentive events emerge here in stative contexts such as those with Class II predicates, or the transitive structures attested in Basque with nazka ‘disgust’ and ardura ‘worry’? Leaving aside this and other questions that have both empirical and theoretical interest, the key aspect here that leads to cross-linguistic variation can be related to the fact that, in Basque there is a dual marking of the subject, viz. ergative and absolutive. As a consequence, there are two possible cases to be combined with the dative. In Italian or any other similar language, however, only a nominative-marked subject is available (again, apart from dative-marked subjects). Therefore, the logical possibilities of case combinations expand in an ergative language, and Basque shows that these possibilities are not only hypothetical but also real.

It is worth pointing out that beyond psych verbs, nouns and adjectives, Basque combines ergative and dative arguments with other predicates as well in a case frame called alternating verbs by Etxepare (2003: 412–414) and bivalent unergatives by Fernández and Ortiz de Urbina (2010: 109–171), illustrated here in (73) below – see also Ortiz de Urbina and Fernández (2016) and references therein.

As commented on above, the inclusion of psych noun/adjectives in Table 8 reveals another possibility not considered in Belletti and Rizzi’s classification, which is available with Basque psych verbs, namely the one including an absolutive experiencer and a dative stimulus, that is, the verbal counterpart of DatStimIS. It should be noted that this particular configuration is attested almost only in northeastern varieties of Basque. We are referring to instances with verbs such as fidatu ‘rely on’, interesatu ‘interest’, ohartu ‘be aware of’ and urrikitu ‘to feel pity for’. We illustrate this type with the verb interesatu ‘interest’ in (73a–b), from the corpora and dictionaries:

Notice that the auxiliary accompanying the verb interesatu ‘interest’ does not show dative agreement with the dative stimulus in any of the sentences. This is a northeastern dialectal phenomenon that allows some instances of the dative agreement to be dropped (the interested reader should consult Etxepare and Oyharçabal (2013) and references therein for details). The emergence of a dative instead of, or alternating with, an adposition has been interpreted as the result of French-Basque contact (see Pikabea (1993) for a detailed diachronic description). Be that as it may, dative stimuli in (73a–b) are not cross-referenced on the auxiliary, and in contrast, dative experiencers of the Class III (piacere ‘please’) are not allowed to drop dative agreement in any dialect.

In relation to that, it is also worth noting that the verb interesatu ‘interest’ belongs to Class III in southwestern varieties of Basque as can be seen in (74) from the EPG:

As far as we know, the only southwestern exception is errukitu ‘feel pity for’, with the same structure as that in northeastern examples in (73), but with obligatory agreement as dative agreement drop is non-attested in this geographical area. Its nominal counterpart erruki ‘pity’ behaves alike (75–76):

Going back to interesatu ‘interest’, this verb is remarkable for any researcher interested in variation within or beyond Basque: it does not only appear as in Class III (piacere ‘please’) type predicates in southwestern varieties, it also occupies a particular class not included in Belletti and Rizzi’s classification, as seen in (73). Moreover, northeastern varieties show also Class-II-like configurations with an ergative stimulus and an absolutive experiencer as has been observed by the dictionaries EEH and NE. Such a structure is shown in (77):

This gives us the opportunity to reflect briefly on variation within Basque. To begin with, it is not clear to us why the same psych noun/adjective can alternate between different structures and thus, different classes. For instance, why do we find the noun/adjectives atsegin ‘pleasure, pleasant’ and laket ‘pleasure, pleasant’ participating in Class I and III with apparently no semantic difference? In relation to this, it should be noted that the two configurations are sometimes attested in the same dialectal area. For example, the noun/adjective laket ‘pleasure, pleasant’ is only attested in northeastern varieties of Basque but nonetheless shows at least the two possible configurations corresponding to Class I and III in these same varieties. Thus, the division between one class and another is not necessarily dialectally groundedsince the two configurations coexist within the same variety.

Nevertheless, sometimes the alternating patterns seem to carry semantic nuances. For instance, let us take again the northeastern configurations of interesatu ‘interest’, that is, the transitive structure exemplified in (77) and the intransitive structure unattested in Belletti and Rizzi’s classification shown in (73). The information provided by Oyharçabal (2009–2013) in NE, his French-Basque dictionary, for the French entry intéresser is, on the one hand, verbe transitif with the meaning captiver ‘charm, amuse’ for the transitive structure; and on the other, verbe pronominal as in s’intéresser with the meaning ‘be interested in, take interest in’. Both French structures involving intéresser are translated into Basque as interesatu ‘interest’. However, only the latter meaning (‘be interested in, take interest in’) can be expressed via an absolutive experiencer plus dative stimulus in (Eastern) Basque, not the former. Hence, at least in some cases, syntactic patterns show semantic nuances that are worth exploring. Besides, cross-linguistic comparison, particularly with French and Spanish the two Romance languages in contact with Basque, also seems relevant in order to understand alternating patterns and their presence or absence in some varieties but not others. The case of the intransitive interesatu involving a stimulus dative is a case in point, as it happens almost only in Northeastern Basque, in the contact area with French, usually together with dative-agreement drop which, as we have already said, is a genuinely northeastern phenomenon.

Moreover, the configurations that arise from the analysis of psych-nominal structures in Basque need to be analyzed in a broader study involving also intransitive structures with postpositions instead of datives. For instance, erruki ‘pity’ occurs in the case frame with an absolutive experiencer and a dative stimulus, shown in (75), but also in an alternative configuration involving the instrumental postposition.

These intransitive structures with absolutive experiencers and postpositional stimuli have been deliberately left out of the paper and were only mentioned in order to clarify the nature of dative stimuli in comparison to experiencers. In addition, transitive structures need particular attention. They have been mentioned here only in order to show ergative-dative alternations for the experiencer – see Ex. (17b) in Section 4.1. Actually, in order to understand some of the reasons behind the alternating patterns in psych structures, we have to take a more general perspective on Basque transitivity and intransitivity.

Finally, yet importantly, the comprehensive study on Basque we have carried out here might be combined with more specific studies on particular varieties of Basque, which will hopefully provide a more complete understanding of psych nominals across dialects.

7 Conclusions

In this paper, we have presented and discussed psych nouns/adjectives and the particular predicative structures they give rise to in an ergative language such as Basque. As we have seen, Belletti and Rizzi’s Class I (temere) and Class III (piacere) have a nominal psych counterpart in Basque, exemplified by atsegin ‘pleasure, pleasant’, but Class II (preoccupare) does not. Besides, we have identified a structure exemplified by leial ‘loyal’ with an absolutive experiencer and a dative stimulus, which behaves inversely to atsegin ‘pleasure, pleasant’ in the piacere-configuration (with a dative experiencer and an absolutive stimulus). Moreover, we have also identified two nominal configurations that are not included in Belletti and Rizzi’s classification and have no verbal counterpart in Basque. These are exemplified respectively by nazka ‘disgust’, which has an ergative experiencer and a dative stimulus, and ardura ‘worry’, which has the opposite configuration.

Although some of the structures identified in the paper seem to be quantitatively more restricted than others (for instance, that with leial ‘loyal’ and ardura ‘worry’), the inclusion of all the nominal predicate types and their interactions with ergative experiencers and stimuli reveals a more fine-grained picture that is worth exploring not only in Basque but also cross-linguistically. On the other hand, we have shown that some tests, such as those previously employed in Scottish Gaelic by Adger and Ramchand (2006) and the dative agreement alternation explored in Basque by Berro and Fernández (2019), as well as the ergative-dative alternation for the experiencer included in this paper, allow us to identify some syntactic properties of these structures.^[12] Based on the latter, particular analyses can be developed from different theoretical perspectives. Berro and Fernández (2019) provide a generativist analysis that covers atsegin ‘pleasure/pleasant’ of the piacere-type and leial ‘loyal’-type predicates and related structures. The analysis of nazka ‘disgust’ and other structures mentioned in the paper is left for future research, along with a cross-linguistic comparison that could shed some light on the nature of psych nominals in human languages, particularly in ergative ones.

Abbreviations

abs

absolutive

acc

accusative

adl

adlative

attr

attributivizer

caus

causal

comit

comitative

compr

comparative

dat

dative

det

determiner

erg

ergative

gen

genitive

impe r

imperative

ines s

inessive

ins

instrumental

ipfv

imperfective

mp

modal particle

neg

negation

nmlz

nominalizer

nom

nominative

p

preposition

pfv

perfective

pl

plural

pres

present

prf

prefix

pros

prospective

psr

possessor

pst

past

ptcp

participle

ptcl

particle

ptv

partitive

q

question

rel

relational

res

resultative

sg

singular

subr

subordinator

sup

superlative