• Mental-State Verb
• Ten Types of Verbs
• Verb of Perception

Examples and Observations:

• "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
  (Thomas Jefferson)
• "Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child."
  (John Updike)

• "The class of mental verbs (also known as 'psych verbs') includes verbs of perception, cognition and emotion. Variation in subject-object assignment is found both across languages and within a single language. . . . English has some apparently synonymous verbs, one of which assigns the experiencer to subject position and the other assigns the experience to object position."
  (James Pustejovsky, Semantics and the Lexicon. Springer, 1993)
• "[T]here are two classes of psych verbs in English, some verbs allowing the experiencer to appear in subject position, as in (22a), while others have the experiencer occurring in object position, as in (22b). The mapping of arguments to syntax appears to be arbitrary:

  22.
  a. The children fear ghosts. (experiencer = subject)
  b. Ghosts frighten the children. (experiencer = object)

  (Lydia White, Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)
• "The distinction between thematic roles and grammatical functions can be observed when we compare agentive transitives with so-called 'psychological' verbs (henceforth psych verbs), i.e. those which describe a psychological event or state. Consider the following pair of sentences:

  33.
  a. John reads the newspaper.
  b. John likes the newspaper.

  In both of these examples, John is the subject and the newspaper is the direct object. However, while in (33a) John is the Agent of the action described by read and the newspaper is the Patient of the action, in (33b) John has the thematic role of Experiencer, the person of whom the psychological state described by like holds, and the newspaper is what that state is about, the Theme. Psych verbs, unlike action transitives, can in fact distribute their thematic roles 'the other way around,' as it were, making the Theme the subject and the Experiencer the object: compare the newspaper pleases/amuses/annoys/appals John with (33b). This possibility gives rise to doublets of psych verbs which are very close in meaning but which distribute their thematic roles differently, such as like/please, fear/frighten, etc."
  (Ian G. Roberts, Diachronic Syntax. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007)