Causal attributions to states and events described by different classes of verbs

Abstract

College students were asked to generate narratives describing the actions and states encoded by four classes of English verbs. Verbs within a class elicited similar narratives, while across classes the event descriptions varied in the animacy and social status of the event participants and in the antecedents and consequences of the target sentence containing the verb. When the same verbs were embedded within sentence contexts and students were asked to generate the remainder of the event, causal attributions matched those generated in the verb‐only context. Results are consistent with the knowledge structure approach to understanding events. Schemas for common English verbs for actions and states contain information about who or what is likely to do or feel the action or state, who or what is likely to be the recipient of the action or to elicit the state, and the causal relations between the schema participants.