Morphosyntactic structure and emotion

Emotion predicates (EPs) have drawn substantial attention in the studies of the syntax-semantics interface. As a unique class of verbs, EPs display a diverse and intriguing range of morpho-syntactic variations associated with semantic distinctions. The traditional dichotomy of Stimulus-subject vs. Experiencer-subject EPs is revisited with an investigation of the lexical semantic properties of EPs in Mandarin Chinese, which sheds valuable new light on cross-linguistic comparison of lexicalization patterns. The Chinese emotion lexicon is unique in three respects: (i) the Stimulus-subject vs. Experiencer-subject distinction is blurred in a number of Chinese EPs; thus, the same utterance wŏ hěn wuliao can be interpreted as ‘I am bored’ or ‘I’m boring’; (ii) the causative construction is resorted to for deriving the Chinese equivalents of English Stimulus-subject verbs (such as excite, surprise) that are lexically missing in Chinese; (iii) the eventive vs. stative distinction that is neutralized in English is lexically and syntactically differentiable in Chinese with different semantic profiles. The Chinese-specific properties of EPs point to a new dimension of form-meaning mapping principles characteristic of emotion predication and call for a re-examination of the typological variations of EPs and their correlation with the topic-comment construction.