Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling

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Alon
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Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling

Post by Alon »

In transitive verbs that describe feelings, the grammatical subject can be the feeler, or the person towards whom the feeling is directed. Examples of the former include love, hate, fear, admire, and pity; examples of the latter include attract, repel, scare, and disgust. Is there any tendency in languages toward one or the other? Do there exist languages that consistently use just one?

Vijay
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Re: Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling

Post by Vijay »

In Malayalam, the subject would be put into dative case for most such verbs and refers to the feeler in all the cases I can think of.

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linguoboy
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Re: Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling

Post by linguoboy »

I think those would be mostly patients (as opposed to agents) in Osage, but I'm not sure it's true in every case without double-checking. (Note: Osage allows doubly-stative verbs, so in a sentence like "He loves me", both "he" and "me" would be represented with patient inflection.)

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