IMPLICIT ARGUMENTS IN SENTENCE PROCESSING

Some arguments of verbs appear to be represented semantically even whe n they are not expressed in a sentence. We investigated a particular e xample of this phenomenon, short verbal passives (e.g., The game show' s wheel was spun), where intuition suggests that our understanding inc ludes an implicit agent (e.g., the agent of the spinning event). In or der to test the hypothesis that an implicit agent was present in short passives, short passive, full passive, active declarative and intrans itive clauses were followed by rationale clauses (e.g., ...to win a pr ize and lots of cash), which are only felicitous when the clause that they modify provides an agent. In a word-by-word, stop-making-sense ta sk, rationale clauses were difficult to process after intransitives on ly when the subject noun phrase was not a good agent for the event in the rationale clause (Experiment 1). Rationale clauses following short passives with the same explicit propositional content (i.e., the same subject and main verb) as intransitives with poor agents were conside rably easier (Experiment 2). Moreover, rationale clauses were no more difficult to process after short passives than after full passive or a ctive clauses that provided a semantically appropriate agent for the r ationale clause (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the sto p-making-sense task was sensitive to small differences among simple br idging inferences. The results are interpreted as evidence that implic it agents are routinely encoded. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.