Telling Something we can't Know: Experimental Approaches to Verbs Exhibiting Implicit Causality

Abstract

An interpersonal verb such as annoy or admire can be categorized according to whether its grammatical subject or grammatical object initiates the interaction described by the verb Such a verb can also be categorized according to whether a derived adjective describes its grammatical subject (e g, annoying) or its grammatical object (e g, admirable) Although there has been much speculation (e g, Brown & Fish, 1983) that these and other characteristics of these verbs shed light on basic principles of human social interaction, we argue that research to date has failed to demonstrate directly any real-time consequences of these verbs during language comprehension We present evidence that the initiating-reacting distinction predicts on-line changes in the accessibility of these verbs' arguments, but that the existence of a derived adjective does not We conclude that tasks that question subjects explicitly about language may fail to reflect the ordinary processes of language comprehension