Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications for a typology of verb classes.

Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is subject to typological variation. The empirical evidence comes from an experimental study on speaker's intuitions, which shows that some experiencer-object verbs in German and Modern Greek differ from canonical transitive verbs in agentivity and stativity, while experiencer-object verbs in Turkish, Yucatec Maya, and Chinese display the semanto-syntactic properties of canonical transitive verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]