THE IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN LANGUAGE - ON T HE SELECTION OF STIMULUS MATERIALS IN STUDIES ON VERB CAUSALITY

Studies dealing with the implicit causality in verbs have shown that e ven minimal descriptions of interpersonal events (e.g. ''Michael apolo gizes to Peter'' or ''Vera admires Karen'') systematically elicit attr ibutions toward the sentence subject or sentence object. However, in t he majority of existing studies, the stimulus materials (i.e., interpe rsonal verbs) have not been selected randomly: Verbs were selected eit her because they had often been used in previous studies, or they were counterbalanced with regard to a number of additional criteria (valen ce, derivational form, etc.), and therefore, a truly random sampling o f stimulus verbs were impossible. In the present study, the criteria f or selecting interpersonal verbs are varied in order to compare two gr oups of verbs, namely, verbs which have been used very often in previo us studies versus a random sample of interpersonal verbs. It is shown that the classical findings concerning the perceived causes of interpe rsonal verbs are less pronounced for the random sample than for the no n-random sample of interpersonal verbs. However, even for the random s ample of verbs, an impressive amount of variance in causal attribution s is explained by different verb types.