Psychological verbs differ from Agent-Patient verbs in two known ways. The first classical problem raised by these verbs is that those verbs have an Experiencer and a Theme that can be projected onto different syntactic configurations, apparently, in an arbitrary way: in the first class, the fear class, the subject of the verb is the Experiencer and the Theme is the object of the verb; the second class, the frighten class, these relationships are reversed. The second issue raised by psych-verbs is that an anaphor inside the subject of a verb that has as first argument a Theme can take the object of the verb as its antecedent. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence for a semantic proposal concerning those problems of psychological verbs. Building on it, I will also propose a new classification for these verbs, by applying Belletti & Rizzi's unaccusative proposal to psychological verbs in Brazilian Portuguese.
Psychological verbs; Argument structure; Unaccusative hypothesis; Thematic roles; Semantic clues
