The Experiencer in Psych Nominalizations: A Descriptive Approach to Catalan

Psych verbs have been extensively studied across various linguistic domains due to their distinctive properties compared to other verb classes. Psych verbs have been classified into three categories based on two criteria: the syntactic role of the experiencer and that of the non-experiencer argument. Psychological nominals, however, uniformly behave as subject-experiencer predicates. This paper argues that the apparent neutralization of psych-verb classes in nominalizations stems primarily from the general absence of a cause argument in nominal structures – especially in nominals derived from Class II psych verbs. This phenomenon is accounted for through both the properties of external arguments and the aspectual properties of nominalizations.