the L words

linguistic puzzle #1: "very" and psych-verbs

this is a puzzle concerning two different classes of psych verbs and the modification of their corresponding adjectives by the adverbial very. i point out that very naturally modifies the adjectival correspondents of psych verbs in the frighten class, but not in the fear class.

the classification of psych-verbs - verbs expressing emotion and other psychological states - into the frighten class and the fear class is well-known. perhaps the most salient difference between them is that in normal active sentences (in english), frighten-class verbs have subjects associated with the stimulus and objects associated with the psychological response. for example, in (1) mary is the person having the experience of fear, while bob is the stimulus that leads mary to have this experience.

(1) bob frightens mary

this is reversed in fear-class verbs. here, bob is the psychological experience, and mary the stimulus.

(2) bob fears mary

other psych verbs in these classes include:

frighten-class: surprise, astound, worry, unnerve, sadden, humiliate, shock, annoy, gladden, irritate, confuse

fear-class: enjoy, admire, appreciate, like, love

the correlation i'd like to point out as requiring a principled explanation involved the adjectival participle versions of these words. the adjectives of the frighten class occur very naturally with the modifier very, but not very naturally with the modifiers well or much.

fine: very surprised, very astounded, very worried

not fine: well surprised, much surprised, well astounded, much astounded, much worried, well worried.

in contrast, the adjectives in the fear class occur less naturally with very, and more naturally with either much or well.

fine: much enjoyed, much admired, much appreciated, much loved, well liked.

not so fine: very enjoyed, very admired, very liked, very loved

exception: very appreciated seems to be fine

the puzzle: what accounts for this fairly strong correlation?

perhaps later i will come back and talk about kennedy and mcnally's hypothesis of open vs. closed scales in gradable adjectives, and how they relate to the choice of very vs. much vs. well, which i do not believe provides an explanation for this correlation. for now, i leave this as a puzzle.