When one wrong rights another: speakers passivize to express the subject as the experiencer in psychological verb use

Abstract Speakers have many choices for how to express a given message yet strongly prefer some over others. We suggest that one preference speakers have in spontaneous language use is presenting the experiencer of an emotion in a salient position: as the subject of the sentence. We extend prior work on the experiencer-as-subject bias to the understudied area of spontaneous language use. We examined a corpus for speakers’ choices regarding a) active versus passive sentences and b) two kinds of psychological verbs, subject-experiencer versus object-experiencer. Language users generally prefer active over passive sentences, and there is some evidence that object-experiencer verbs (e.g., Mary frightens Lisa) are dispreferred compared to subject-experiencer verbs (e.g., Lisa fears Mary) much as passive sentences are compared to active sentences. However, in line with an experiencer-as-subject bias, we show how one wrong can right another: speakers show a greater-than-expected preference to produce a generally dispreferred sentence structure, when doing so achieves the desired experiencer-as-subject. Specifically, we find stark differences in passive use rates: as many as 50 % of the uses of certain verbs in the dispreferred object-experiencer verb class are passive, while 4 % is the highest rate of passive sentences for verbs in the preferred subject-experiencer verb class.