Alignment changes with Spanish experiential verbs

Abstract

AbstractExperiential verbs have a tendency to exhibit a variety of argument patterns across and within languages. The concern in the present chapter lies with a group of emotional predicates from Spanish, which in their basic transitive use assign the subject function to the stimulus and the direct object role to the experiencer, but which allow for three alternative mappings serving to upgrade the experiencer, while simultaneously signalling the affected condition of the promoted human participant. The alternatives encompass a middle voice structure, a non-canonical dative valence frame, and, unexpectedly, a type of patient subject construction reminiscent of ‘active’ alignment systems. The three coding strategies are first characterised from a typological point of view and the ensuing discussion focuses on their development in Spanish with the emotional verbs under study.