Agent or Experiencer? A Search for the Subject Role in the Mental Verb Myśleć 'Think' in Polish

Abstract

In the paper, we focus on the verb myśleć ‘think’ in Polish and attempt to find out whether there is any correspondence between the semantic features of the subject and verb grammatical constructions. First, senses of the verb will be identified, and then their subjects will be assigned the four agentive features. Next, on the basis of corpus data the actual patterns of sense use will be searched for by means of an exploratory tool, i.e. Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The tool should help us to see the correlation between the senses and the features. Positive results of our study would confirm the general cognitive assumption that syntactic structures are meaningful, rather than arbitrary and unpredictable.