Marina Dzhonova
2022
Syntactic characteristics of emotive predicates in Bulgarian: A corpus-based study
Yovka Tisheva
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Marina Dzhonova
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB 2022)
The paper presents a corpus-based study of emotive predicates (verbs and predicative constructions with adjectival, adverbial or noun phrases) in Bulgarian with respect to their syntactic characteristics. The sources of empirical data analyzed here are Bulgarian National Corpus, Corpus of Bulgarian Political and Journalistic Speech and Bulgarian part of Multilingual Comparable Corpora of Parliamentary Debates ParlaMint. The analyzes are organized in terms of morpho-syntactic features of emotive predicates, transitivity, syntactic functions and theta-roles of their arguments. Emotive predicates denote a state or an event involving an affective experience. As part of the special semantic class of psychological/Experiencer verbs, they have been studied in relation to the interaction between lexical semantics and argument realization. Bulgarian data confirm the well-established division of Psych predicates into three classes: Subject Experiencer (fear type verbs), Object Experiencer (frighten type verbs), Dative Experiencer. The third class is mostly represented by adverbial predicates.