What are implicit causality and consequentiality?

Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics

“…More recently, several authors have suggested that because introduces an explanation, rather than a cause per se (Kehler, 2002;Kehler et al, 2008;Pickering and Majid, 2007). Either account is consistent with the analysis here, since explanations by necessity are more likely to refer to entities that were causally responsible for an event (Kehler, 2002;Kehler et al, 2008).…”

“…Psycholinguists have used IC as a test case for studying the interplay of bottom--up and top--down processing in language comprehension (Featherstone & Sturt, 2010;Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill, & Gernsbacher, 1996;Greene & McKoon, 1995;Guerry, Gimenes, Caplan, & Rigalleau, 2006;Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006;Long & De Ley, 2000;McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995;McKoon, Greene, & Ratcliff, 1993;Shen & Yang, 2006;Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000;) and the developmental origins of these processes (Pyykkonen, Matthews, & Jarvikivi, 2010). While some of these researchers have approached IC as an isolated phenomenon, others have addressed it as part of a broader theory of discourse coherence, treating it as a specific example of how the interpretation of one sentence is constrained by its relation to other sentences in the discourse (Frank, Koppen, Noordman, & Vonk, 2007;Kehler, Kertz, Rohde, & Elman, 2008;Crinean & Garnham, 2006;Ehrlich, 1980;Pickering & Majid, 2007;Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 1998). Other researchers have asked whether IC is an effect of language on thought or of thought on language (Brown & Fish, 1983a;Hoffman & Tchir, 1990) a la the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis (Whorf, 1956).…”

From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality

“…In psycholinguistics and social psychology, such expectations have been discussed with regard to a number of verbs which are characterized as implicit causality verbs (henceforth, IC verbs; Brown & Fish 1983;Au 1986;Rudolph & Försterling 1997;Pickering & Majid 2007). In general, IC verbs are transitive verbs with two animate arguments characterized by the particular property of triggering explanations focusing systematically on one of the two arguments when followed by a because clause.…”

Implicit causality bias in English: a corpus of 300 verbs

“…Another issue is whether the basic phenomenon of implicit causality is best characterized as all-or-none (e.g., for ExpStim verbs, Stim IS the implicit cause, Crinean & Garnham, 2006), with biases arising through additional factors when explicit causes are generated, or as graded (Pickering & Majid, 2007), so that a bias is directly associated with the verb in addition to its thematic structure.…”