Dative Experiencer Psych-Verbs in Italian and Spanish

This study investigates how argument structure interacts with Information Structure (IS) in Dative Experiencer (DE) psych-verbs of the piacere/gustar type in Italian and Spanish. These verbs display non-canonical mapping between thematic and grammatical roles, in which the Experiencer surfaces as a dative object and the Theme as the subject. Through a semi-spontaneous production experiment based on the Question with a Delayed Answer (QDA) methodology, the study elicited natural utterances to investigate how speakers encode Information Focus (IF) on the Theme. The results show a consistent pattern across the two languages, with a strong preference for postverbal realizations of the Theme and frequent overt expression of the Experiencer, interpreted as a Familiar Topic. Preliminary prosodic data further support this interpretation, showing that the Experiencer bears a low tonal contour typical of given material, whereas the postverbal subject has included in the prosodic boundary of the sentence. Taken together, these findings suggest that DE psych-verbs encode a grammar-internal mechanism that links thematic and informational hierarchies, where morphosyntactic structure, case, position and prosody jointly contribute to the interpretability of discourse relations.