Verbes de sentiment « figurés » de la classe N0 V N1sujet_intentionnel

Summary This paper accounts for French and Italian figurative verbs of emotion. These verbs are ambiguous in so far as they have a “physical » and a “psychological » meaning. French verbs are extracted from LG Table 4. I will consider the idea put forward by Lamiroy that the psychological use a of given verb can be determined by a reduction of syntactical flexibility in comparison to the physical use. Evidence will be given that at least as far as Table 4 verbs are concerned this is not the case. The approaches of Bouchard and Van Voorst who propose general semantic rules concerning the relation of physical and psychological meaning also fail to account for the data. This will be illustrated by a closer look on French and Italian verbs of anger. Although the devices of metaphorical interpretation can be explained, these devices are not general rules that permit the derivation of a psychological use from a physical use in a given context. Lexicalization seems to be idiosynchratic. Hence, LG has to provide separate lexical entries for the two constructions of any existing ambiguous verb.