Argument alternations of the Dutch psych verbs

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus study of the alternation between the reflexive and transitive argument constructions of the Dutch psych verbs ergeren (‘to annoy’), interesseren (‘to interest’), storen (‘to disturb’) and verbazen (‘to amaze’), as in Jij ergert je aan mij vs. Ik erger jou (both ‘I annoy you’). Logistic regression analysis revealed that the choice of the language user was driven by – in order of decreasing importance – the choice of verb, the morphological form of the stimulus, the animacy of the stimulus, the morphological form of the experiencer, and a number of nuisance variables. However, verbs whose lexical meaning entailed a more agentive experiencer did not more often realize this experiencer in subject position than other verbs, nor could the preference of the verbs be predicted by looking at their etymology.