Review - Los predicados psicológicos

Abstract

Los predicados psicológicos, edited by Rafael Marín, proposes a collection of contributions focused on psychological predicates in Spanish. As Marín notices, psychological predicates are predicates that refer to an emotion or a mental or psychological state experienced by an individual, and they have an experiencer argument in their thematic roles that can occupy more than a syntactic position. These statements can be expressed by verbs like preocupar ('to worry'), adjectives like molesto ('annoyed') or nouns like indignación ('indignation'). Although most of the contributions deal with issues relative to psychological verbs, other chapters also deal with psychological nouns, adjectives and even complex predicates.

            The book, written completely in Spanish, is comprised of an introduction and seven contributions that analyse the topic of psychological predicates from different levels — not only syntactic and semantic aspects but also morphological aspects. The book also deals with different models, such as Neoconstructionism, Nanosyntax, Distributed Morphology. Likewise, not all of the chapters adopt the same perspective, since there are articles with theoretical approaches and others with empirical ones.