Implicit verb causality: Context effects on production of events

A robust finding in the psycholinguistic literature is that for many interpersonal verbs there is a clear bias concerning which argument caused the state or event described by the verb. In 'Steve praised Ann', Ann is usually considered the cause, whereas in 'Steve charmed Ann', Steve is the preferred cause. This bias is called 'implicit verb causality'. The project investigates the causes and consequences of implicit verb causality, particularly focusing on usage-based explanations.

Projektbeginn: 01.08.2014
Projektende: 31.12.2018

Ferstl EC, Konieczny L

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Institut für Psychologie
Abt. Kognitionswissenschaft und Genderforschung
Hebelstr. 10
79104 Freiburg i. Br.

Telefon: 0761 / 2034933
Fax: 0761 / 2034938
Email: sekretariat@cognition.uni-freiburg.de
http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/cognition/

• van den Hoven E

• GRK 1624, DFG
• Übergangsstipendium, DFG

• van den Hoven, Ferstl EC: Predictability affects referential form when content is kept constant. 2017 (3rd DETEC conference, Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives, Nijmegen, NL).
• van den Hoven E, Ferstl EC: Association with explanation-conveying constructions predicts verbs' implicit causality biases Int J Corpus Linguis, 2017; 22 (4): 521-550. : http://doi:10.1075/ijcl.16121.hov
• van den Hoven E, Ferstl EC: A pragmatic account of implicit causality. 2016 (22nd Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), Bilbao, Spanien).
• van den Hoven E, Ferstl EC: A usage-based perspective on implicit causality. 2015 (28th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Los Angeles, CA, USA).