Tolerating subject-experiencers?

Yang's Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English

Abstract

This article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang's (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang's (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical "tipping points"