INTERPERSONAL VERBS AND DISPOSITIONAL ADJECTIVES - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CAUSALITY EMBODIED IN LANGUAGE

A series of studies showed that the tendency to assign greater causal weight to one interactant than to the other in sentence-events such as A doted on B or A detested B is related to the attributive reference of the adjective derived from the sentence verb. Thus, the pattern of causal weights for doted on (which has the derived form doting to describe A but none to describe B) favors A more so than does the pattern for detested(which has the form detestable to describe B but none to describe A). The effect was shown to be completely general across the verb types studied and was also obtained in an experiment using nonsense verbs and adjectives. The findings are discussed as they bear on the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic determinism and are interpreted as showing that the way in which people think about interpersonal causality is related to, and perhaps affected by, the content of the interpersonal lexicon.