Initiators, states and passives in Spanish psych verbs

Abstract

The goal here is twofold: the first one is to point out the existence of at least two classes of Object Experiencer psychological verbs (henceforth, OEPV) in Spanish with respect to their passive behavior, casting doubt on Landau (2010), who proposes that passivization of OEPVs correlates with the availability of pseudo-passives in a language. The second one is to argue that passives of OEPVs match the aspectual and argumental properties of verbs in such a way that the verbs which do not satisfy the condition that passives must involve events in Spanish must build those events through a repetitive, pluractional interpretation.