Constructions with subject vs. object experiencers in Spanish and Italian

This study analyzes Spanish and Italian clauses that denote processes or states of feeling or emotion involving two participants, an experiencer and a stimulus. Some of these clauses construe the experiencer as Subject and the stimulus as Object, while others have experiencers coded as dative or accusative Objects and stimuli as Subjects. Using corpus data, we track the frequency and distribution of a number of discourse-related properties of the arguments, such as animacy, person, and syntactic category, in order to gain insight into how both constructions are really used and conceived of by speakers. The results point to a non-random distribution of these properties when comparing the ‘Experiencer-as-Subject’ with the ‘Experiencer-as-Object’ constructions, and reveal striking differences in their frequency across textual genres.