Generalising paths into psychological verbs. Evidence from Spanish

1. The problem. This paper presents an original account for the lexical properties of object experiencer psycho-logical verbs, namely one in which path is a relevant component in their semantics. So-called psychological verbs have generated a huge amount of studies, mostly focusing on syntactic aspects (Belletti and Rizzi, 1988). From an aspectual point of view, we assume that object experiencer psychological verbs denote stage-level states (Arad, 1999; Marı́n and McNally, 2011). In this paper we aim at taking a step forward so as to explain why object experiencer psych verbs denote stage-level states. Focusing on Spanish data, we argue that object experiencer psych verbs such as asustar ’to frighten ’ denote a state anchored in a particular domain, derived from a deeper meaning of location. We claim that the most suitable way to represent this meaning is by means of the semantic component of path. Specifically, we propose to extend the notion of path introduced i