| Sumario: | In Russian, many past passive participles of verbs of emotion, e.g. obižen(nyj) 'offended', obradovan(nyj) 'gladdened', obespokoen(nyj) 'worried', allow for variation in the encoding of the stimulus: the instrumental case competes with the alternative means, which we call lexical. The lexical means are specific for each participle and coincide with the ones used by the corresponding reflexive verbs. Based on corpus data, we argue that the instrumental encoding is associated with the construal of the stimulus as the cause of the emotion, whereas the lexical encoding highlights the target component of the stimulus role. In particular, the instrumental encoding is preferred for inanimate stimuli, which are more likely to constitute the cause of an emotion, whereas lexical encoding is more frequently used for animate stimuli, which are more likely to figure as targets of an emotion. The instrumental is statistically associated with the long form of the participle, which is explained by the fact that these forms are often used in non-restrictive relative clauses that provide the cause of the main clause event. Diachronically, we see indications of the drift from the instrumental to the lexical encoding of the stimulus in constructions with participles, which parallels a similar development in reflexive verbs. We hypothesize that the lexical encoding of the stimulus indicates the emancipation of participles from transitive verbs and their attraction to the corresponding reflexives.
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