Interpersonal verbs: Implicit causality of action verbs and contextual factors

The hypothesis that the degree of contextual dependence of interpersonal verbs (as defined by Semin and Fiedler (1988) in their LCM) significantly affects the strength of causality implicit in such verbs is assessed in an experiment. Results show that both the strength of causal inference induced by the verb and the degree of respondents' confidence in their own judgements increases from descriptive action verbs (DAV), to interpretive action verbs (IAV), to state action verbs (SAV), to state verbs (SV). Furthermore, the effect of contextual factors (gender of the stimulus sentence subject and object and respondents' gender) is shown to be stronger for more descriptive verbs like DAV and weaker for more abstract verbs like SV.