TELLING SOMETHING WE CAN'T KNOW: Experimental Approaches to Verbs Exhibiting Implicit Causality

An tnterpersonal verb such as annoy or admire can be categortzed accordtng to whether tts grammatical subject or grammatical object initiates the interaction described by the verb Such a verb can also be categorized accordtng to whether a denved adjective describes tts grammatical subject (e g , annoying) or tts grammatical object (e g , admirable) Although there has been much speculation (e g , Brown & Fish, 1983) that these and other characteristics of these verbs 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 tnittatmg-reacttng distinction predicts on-line changes tn the accessibility of these verbs' arguments, but that the existence of a denved adjective does not We conclude that tasks that question subjects explicitly about language may fail to reflect the ordinary processes of language comprehension