Abstract

In language processing, the study of sentence or text semantics has a long tradition of its own since the proposal of case relations by Fillmore in 1968. This article tackles the issue about sentence/text semantics with a focus on the psych movement predicates. In English, Psych movement verbs have a derivational system of their own. In order to achieve a thorough understanding of psych movement phenomenon, this study exploits the issue from a comparative linguistic point of view. Case relations and derivational systems of English are reviewed to identify their relationship with psych movement verbs. The evidence of psych movement adjectives in the non-inflectional language Chinese is discussed to support the claims that psych movement phenomenon does occur in Chinese. Three words amuse, bore, and interest in terms of their predicative quality and case relations in English and Chinese are analyzed. The analysis shows that the predicative quality can not fully account for the psych movement phenomenon in a sentence or text. Rather, the integrity of the whole sentence or text should be taken into account to construct a complete semantic relation of psych movement phenomenon in language processing.

Key Words: psych movement, sentence/text semantics, case relations, derivation, Chinese-English comparative study, language processing