The causes and consequences explicit in verbs
Name
Hartshorne_Cons_Rerevised.pdf
Size
1.27 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
9ccc4407c3c8ee92d257b8bbfad292a6
Author(s)
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Hartshorne, Joshua
O'Donnell, Timothy John
Date Issued
February 2015
Journal
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
Publisher
Routledge
Citation
Hartshorne, Joshua K., Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. “The Causes and Consequences Explicit in Verbs.” Language, Cognition and Neuroscience (February 9, 2015): 1–19.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he … (he = Archibald) with Archibald criticised Bartholomew because he … (he = Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from world knowledge. We report evidence favouring the former account. We elicited pronoun biases for 502 verbs from seven Levin verb classes in two discourse contexts (implicit causality and implicit consequentiality), showing that in both contexts, verb class reliably predicts pronoun bias. These results confirm and extend recent findings about implicit causality and represent the first such study for implicit consequentiality. We discuss these findings in the context of recent work in semantics, and also develop a new, probabilistic generative account of pronoun interpretation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1008524
