TELLING SOMETHING WE CANT KNOW - EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES TO VERBS EXHIBITING IMPLICIT CAUSALITY

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 ver bs 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 an-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.