Interpersonal verbs and dispositional adjectives: The psychology of causality embodied in language.

A series of studies showed that the tendency to assign greater causal weight to one interactant than to the other in sentence-events such as A doted on B or A detested B is related to the attributive reference of the adjective derived from the sentence verb. Thus, the pattern of causal weights for doted on (which has the derived form doting to describe A but none to describe B) favors A more so than does the pattern for detested (which has the form detestable to describe B but none to describe A). The effect was shown to be completely general across the verb types studied and was also obtained in an experiment using nonsense verbs and adjectives