Linda,

I like your explanation.  This may have influenced why "afraid" has become the more formal choice, although I suspect its history has more to do with it.  Afraid is the past participle of an archaic 14th c. Anglo-French word "affray", meaning "to disturb" or "to startle".  We've lost all the other forms of the verb but kept the ppl. as an adjective.  This happens often.  Who still thinks of "sodden" as the past participle of "seethe"?  We relate "molten" to "melt" more easily, but we still don't use "molten" as a past participle any more.  "Scare", on the other hand, comes from Old Norse through the Viking invasion 400 years earlier and was firmly a part of English.  Afraid was a part of upper class, Norman speech and scare a part of Anglo-Saxon commoner language.  We have a lot of other pairs that show the same sort of history.

Herb


 
Intriguing question!
 
I agree with Herb that it's more a question of speech than of grammatical  
category.
Now I have my own questions:
 
Does anyone know if 'afraid' derives from 'afeared'? It would make sense.  
But not knowing this makes the solution easier: Why do we prefer the adjective  
over the past participle?
 
The verb event semantics seem to hold an answer. I think that the  problem 
has more to do with the idea of agency and the way in which we  understand the 
verb semantics structurally.
 
We see "frighten" and "scare" as verbs that require agents (to do the  
frightening and the scaring) and patients as receivers of the emotional effect  of 
whatever action causes the state of being frightened or scared.  And I  think 
that because the idea of agency seems stronger in the context of  'scare' than 
'frighten' (because of usage more than anything else), it seems  odder or more 
informal to use 'scare' in the adjectival/passive context in the  examples. 
One way in which to demonstrate this is to contrast how acceptable it  is to 
use the verbs with both animate and inanimate subject arguments: (And note  that 
some speakers see no acceptability-difference in these  readings) 
 
The dog frightened me.
The dog scared me.     
Dogs can be agents, so both sentences are fine.
 
The picture frightened me.
?The picture scared me.
 
The color frightened me
??The color scared me.
 
In the last two example sets, the 'frighten' sentences are more acceptable  
than the 'scare' sentences because of the stronger degree of agency required 
for  'scare'.  This is perceptual, though. The difference may not be apparent  
for all speakers of English. Or it may be reversed for some speakers. But for  
me, that degree of agency is really clear.  But I think that it is agency  
that is causing the question about these verb usages.  And because "afraid"  is 
not readily seen as a past participle, it doesn't have this issue with  agency.
 
Being an adjective, "afraid" refers to a state of the subject participant  in 
the event, and so it seems much more acceptable adjective than the verbals.  
It is especially more acceptable than "scared" because that verb requires a  
stronger agent than "frighten."
 
Or so I think!
 
Linda Di Desidero

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