Why do we like coffee... and hate it (grammatically speaking)?

PalmYou may have said more than once, "I like coffee but I hate tea." These are two simple, almost symmetrical sentences that express your preferences. If we pay attention, we'll see that they don't function the same way. In "I like coffee," the subject is coffee, not "I." The speaker appears as the indirect object: "(coffee) is liked by me." In contrast, in "I hate tea," "I" is the subject, while "tea" is the direct object. They express similar experiences, but with different grammatical structures. Verbs like "to like" and "to hate," as well as "to worry," "to frighten," "to interest," and "to bother," are examples of what linguists call psychological verbs—verbs that express mental or emotional states. They all share the same situation: there is someone who feels an emotion (the experiencer) and something that provokes it (the stimulus or theme). What changes between languages—and even within the same language—is how these two roles are organized in the sentence.

Psychological Verbs

In the late 1980s, Italian linguists Luigi Rizzi and Adriana Belletti proposed a classification that has become a benchmark. According to their study (titled 'Psych Verbs and Theta-Theory' and published in 1988 in the journal Natural Language & Linguistic TheoryIn psychological verbs, the roles of "who feels" and "what causes the feeling" can be distributed according to three basic patterns: in the first, the experiencer is the subject ('I fear the dark'); in the second, the experiencer is the direct object ('Dark places frighten me'); and in the third, the experiencer is an indirect object ('I like coffee'). These three patterns reflect grammatical structures shared by all languages, although they use them with varying frequency. For example, in Catalan, as in Spanish or Italian, it is common to use verbs of the third type, with the experiencer in the form of an indirect object (with pronouns in the dative case). Hence, we get structures like 'I like coffee,' 'He's worried about the exam,' and 'The noise bothers him,' among others. In all of these, the subject is the cause of the psychological state, and the indirect object indicates who feels it. English, on the other hand, tends to use the first pattern, with the experimenter as the subject: this is what we see in the sentences 'I like coffee' (literally, 'I like coffee', although what he really means is 'I enjoy coffee') or 'And fear darkness' ('I fear the dark'). This does not mean that English does not know the other types of verbs: 'bother' ('bother') and 'interest' ('interest'), among others, follow the second pattern. Therefore, in the phrase 'Noise bothers me' ('the noise bothers me'), the subject is the stimulus and the experimenter, the object.

If we broaden our perspective to other languages, we will see that the patterns are repeated. Czech, for example, says 'Líbi se mi káva' ('I like coffee'), just like in Catalan: the subject ('káva''coffee' is the stimulus, and the pronoun 'my' ('to me') is an experiencer dative. German combines patterns: 'Ich mago Kaffee' It corresponds to the first type, with an experimenting subject ('ich') and a stimulus that is the direct object ('Kaffee'); instead, 'Der Kaffee gefällt mir' (which also means 'I like coffee') would correspond to the third type. Norwegian, like English, opts for the first type: 'Jeg liker kaffeThis variety shows how most languages share the same three paths for expressing emotional experience. What varies is which one they use most frequently and which verbs follow each pattern. In fact, in Catalan there are even cases where the same verb can follow the second pattern (with an experiencer acting as a direct object) or the third (with an experiencer acting as an indirect object). For example, we can say that a student 'He's worried about the exam, like he's 'concerned'. With 'Something similar happens with 'interesar': it is possible to say that someone 'is interested in music', but also that 'it interests them'.

We also find structural nuances between 'preocupar' and 'preocuparse', and 'preocuparse' and 'preocuparse', among others. In this sense, 'me preocupa el examen' and 'me preocupa el examen' are not equivalent: in the first, the stimulus ('the exam') is external; in the second, the speaker initiates the process. The change of pronoun is not anecdotal, but rather corresponds to a change in syntactic pattern.

All of this has practical effects. Thus, while native speakers learn and use the patterns of each verb intuitively, for language learners the distinction is not always easy. For example, English speakers learning Catalan often find a structure like 'me gusta el café' difficult, because it reverses the roles with respect toAnd like coffeeNow, knowing that both sentences follow one of the three possible patterns, the difference ceases to be arbitrary: it is just another way of applying the same general principle.

Relationship between elements

It is necessary to understand, then, that grammar, more than a set of isolated rules, is a coherent system of relationships between the elements of a sentence. When we compare 'I like coffee',And like coffee', 'der Kaffee gefällt mir', 'libí se mi káva' either 'jeg liker kaffe'We observe variations of the same universal pattern.

In this framework, psychological verbs show how the same experience (to be afraid, to like, to annoy) can be grammatically ordered in diverse ways, but within the same system. Ultimately, behind everyday phrases like a simple 'I like coffee', there is a shared structure that reminds us that all languages allow us to say the same thing, although each does so in its own way.