Paul ärgert sich, nervt sich aber nicht. Semantic features of German object-experiencer verbs and their influence on anticausative constructions

Niklas WISKANDT

Abstract

Object-experiencer verbs show, cross-linguistically, several syntactic peculiarities, but do not form a homogeneous class. This paper deals with anticausative constructions of such verbs, which are marked by a reflexive pronoun in German, as in Paul freut sich (‚Paul is happy‘). These constructions are possible with some object-experiencer verbs, but not with all of them: An anticausative construction is possible for the verb ärgern (‚annoy‘), but not for the semantically proximate verb nerven. Based on corpus data as well as acceptability and interpretation judgements of native speakers, the paper investigates the influence of several semantic factors in order to explain this asymmetry.