Volume 22, Issue 4
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Abstract

Given a sentence such as , the verb leads people to interpret as referring to , whereas leads people to interpret as referring to . This phenomenon is known as implicit causality (IC). Recent studies have shown that verbs’ causality biases closely correspond to the verbs’ semantic classes, as classified in , a lexicon that groups verbs into classes on the basis of syntactic behavior. The current study further investigates the relationship between causality biases and semantic classes. Using corpus data we show that the collostruction strength between verbs and the syntactic constructions that classes are based on can be a good predictor of causality bias. This result suggests that the relation between semantic class and causality bias is not a categorical matter; more typical members of the semantic class show a stronger causality bias than less typical members.

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2017-12-01
2024-03-28
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Keyword(s): collostruction strength; constructions; implicit causality; semantic structure

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