Lexical encoding of event participant information

The typical understanding of a short passive sentence like The ship was sunk is that it was sunk by someone. We investigated whether unexpressed agent information is introduced via semantic argument information associated with the lexical representations of verbs, or instead via conceptually derived inferences. We demonstrate, in self-paced reading and eye-monitoring studies, that implicit agents are derived from lexical rather than conceptual sources and that verb argument structure information is accessed as soon as a verb is recognized. (C) 1999 Academic Press.