Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases(86) a Sally saw a ghost
b Harry heard the news
c Fred fears the dark
The obvious question that needs to be asked is whether the experiencer subject
occupies a similar position to an agent subject or a different one. The choices would
seem to be to place the experiencer in the specifier of an abstract light verb, or to place
it in the specifier of the thematic verb:
(87) a vP b VP
DP v' DP V'
Harry v VP Harry V DP
e heard the news heard the news
One observation that might be relevant here is that there are some verbs which take
both agent and experiencer arguments. With these verbs, the agent always precedes the
experiencer:
(88) a Freddy frightened me
b Ursula upset the waiter
c Dennis disappointed his parents
Assuming that the agent is in the specifier of a light verb, these observations suggest
that the experiencer is in the specifier of the thematic verb, like theme arguments:
(89) vP
DP v'
Freddy v VP
fightened 1 v DP V'
e me V
t 1
This would support the structure in (87b) which has the experiencer in the specifier of
the thematic VP, as in (89).
A second observation that seems to support (87b) concerns the event structure of
transitive verbs with experiencer subjects. Certainly there does not appear to be a
causative relationship between what the subject is interpreted as doing and what
happens to the object. (86c), for example, does not appear to be interpretable as Fred
doing something that results in the dark being feared. Instead it seems that these
sentences express a simple state of affairs with no sub-events: