"Being red vs blushing: The morphosyntax of permanent and transient properties"

There is preliminary evidence that predicates expressing permanent properties, like “being intelligent”, and those expressing transient properties, like “being sad”, are systematically associated with non-trivially different

morphological and syntactic expressions in the languages of the world. The aims of the project are 1) to

establish this result—the outcome of a short pilot project conducted in 2019—more solidly, 2) to provide a

formal account thereof, in terms of a syntactic approach to the lexicon and morphology, and 3) to progress

towards the design of experimental methodology that eventually allows us to elucidate whether the differences

observed are actually hard-wired.