Universal 1508: general psych-verbs > general emotion verbs > evaluation, WANT > verbs of authority, ruling
- Original
- Hierarchy of verb classes often using subject or object displacement*:
general psych-verbs > general emotion verbs > evaluation, WANT > verbs of authority, ruling.To the left are the more general and widely attested groups; those to the right are more specific and less frequently found.
- Standardized
- IF verbs of authority and ruling use subject or object dispacement, THEN emotion verbs use these displacements as well.
IF emotion verbs use subject or object dispacement, THEN emotion verbs with semantic component WANT will use subject or object dispacement.
IF emotion verbs with semantic component WANT use subject or object dispacement, THEN general emotion verbs use these dispacements as well.
IF general emotion verbs use subject or object displacement, THEN general psych-verbs use these displacements as well. - Keywords
- verb, semantics, subject, object
- Domain
- syntax, semantics
- Type
- implicational hierarchy
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- statistical
- Basis
- languages in Nichols 1975
- Source
- Nichols 1975: 347
- Counterexamples
1. DISPLACEMENT — distinctive treatment of a salient class, with departure from the dominant scheme. Distinctive treatment of verbal classes produces the three displacement patterns: subject displacement, object displacement, and voice displacement. For example, Slavic languages display a sizable set of psych-verbs with dative experiencers, e.g. Russian: mne nravitsja ‘I like’, mne izvestno ‘I know’, mne xolodno ‘ I am cold’ (mne – 1Sg Dat). Finish shows the genitive in the analogous constructions. In Latin psych-verbs are set apart by voice displacement, i.e. there is a set of formally passive but active in menaning verbs, e.g. fruor ‘enjoy’, vereor ‘fear’, etc.2. Some languages are more prone to use displacement than are others. Thus Uralic, Indo-European, and East Caucasian tolerate much more displacement than do West Caucasian, Basque, Paleosiberian, and apparently Turkic.