Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

This feature deals with experiencer constructions corresponding to English The child is afraid, which may involve three semantic entities: the experiencer ('the child'), the sensation ('fear'), and the "body-part" ('my heart/my soul'). We ask which entity is expressed in the subject position, whether we are dealing with a verbal/non-verbal or transitive/intransitive construction, and whether the experiencer is subject, object, dative, or oblique. We disregard 'fear' constructions in which the stimulus is expressed overtly, i.e. we are looking at 'The child is afraid', but not at 'The child is afraid of the dog.'