Case Marking and French Psych-Verbs

This article confirms that two classes of psych-verbs in French, amuser-type ("accusative") and manquer-type ("unaccusative"), involve movement into the subject position. However, the two classes are distinguished by their ability to assign accusative Case: the former assign accusative Case and thereby mimic the syntactic behavior of transitive verbs; the latter assign only partitive Case, thus precluding accusative clitics, passive and WH extraction. The existence of different syntactic configurations of thematic roles with different psych-verb classes indicates a lack of direct correlation between syntactic position and thematic role.