ABSTRACT
Psych verbs, such as fear, love, care, disappoint, denote psychological processes or mental states. These verbs have drawn special attention from linguists as well as language acquisition researchers. Because the Experiencer arguments can be subjects or objects, psych verbs seem to display arbitrary mapping of thematic roles to syntactic positions, which poses a challenge for second language learners. The questions that have been addressed include the following: What theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain their properties? How are psych verbs represented in learners’ grammars? What difficulties do noncanonical semantic-syntactic mapping and other properties pose for second language learners? This chapter offers a critical overview of the studies conducted to answer some of these questions and proposes directions for future research on L2 acquisition of psych constructions.
