Events versus States: Empirical Correlates of Lexical Classes

Philosophers and linguists have claimed that verb meanings are divided into semantic types or superordinate categories that differ in internal conceptual structure. In particular, eventive verbs, which have internal causal structure are distinguished from stative verbs, which have no internal causal structure. In this paper, we explore the processing consequences of assuming that the lexical representations of verb meanings differ in the complexity of their internal representations. We conducted two experiments, a lexical decision task and a self-paced reading study, that investigated how verb types of different complexity are processed. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs would take longer to process than stative verbs. In both experiments, this prediction was confirmed. This lends support to theories of verb concepts that propose classifications based on internal representations and shows that there are discrete and abstract conceptual categories in the domain of events.