The subject of Icelandic psych-verbs : A minimalistic account

In this paper I have suggested an account of the syntactic behavior of different types of Icelandic psych-verbs in the terms of the Minimalist framework. In particular I have been concerned with the choice of subject for different kinds of psych-verbs: most psych-verbs in Icelandic must select a designated argument as the subject, but for a particular set of psych-verbs, highlighted in Barodal (1999), either argument may be taken as the subject. I have tried to show that this behavior follows immediately from the organization of the VP, the language specific property of Icelandic to have oblique subjects, and two independently motivated universal principles, Shortest Move and the Principle of Minimal Compliance. If I am right, what is peculiar about the Icelandic psych-verbs with two syntactic frames is only their particular argument structure, a solely lexical property. Compared with the account in Barodal (1999) in terms of Construction Grammar, which has to postulate that these verbs activate two schemas, semantically related as active-passive (without passive morphology), the Minimalistic approach suggested here seems to be more economical