The Implicit Causality in Verbs

Abstract

Natural languages display a great variety of devices that are used to speak of causal relations, ranging from prepositions, subordinating conjunctions and verbs. The present contribution provides a review of both theoretical and psycholinguistic approaches to causality in language. The focus will be causal relations expressed by verbs. Implicit causality refers to the observation that certain verbs tend to prefer statistically reliable causal antecedents (Garvey and Caramazza, 1974). These causal biases can affect the likelihood of remention in the subsequent discourse.