The Psychological Causality ImplicIT
...Fiedler (Semin & Fiedler, 1991, p.2) (referred) stated that with few exceptions such as non-verbal behavior, language enters social psychological phenomena at all imaginable levels. As a particular respect of this argument, the psychological causality implicit in English language shows the interaction between language and social cognitive processing. Focus on showing the causality relationships in language, verbs are the most important element. To describe an action, or explain a psychological state, different verbs lead to different outcomes. Based on the Linguistic Category Model (LCM), interpersonal verbs in English have been divided into four categories. There are descriptive action verbs (DAV), interpretive action verbs (IAV), state action verbs (SAV), state verbs (SV) (Semin & Fiedler, 1991, p.5). As implied by these names, the first two categories which are named action verbs can concretely describe the activities, whereas the other two types which are named state verbs can be used to express the psychological states. In this survey, we (examined) found out that only two categories (which) are IAV and SV. Therefore, (I will show ) the definition of these two types of interpersonal verbs will be given in details. Interpretive action verbs (e.g. correct, help, threaten, nag, etc.) show the reference to the single behavioral event, and the specific object and situation. The state verbs (e.g. trust, respect, loathe, dislike, etc.) (express) reflect the enduring states, abstraction from single events and reference to social object. (Semin & Fiedler, 1991, p.5) In other words, IAV is a description of an active with a clear( beginning)initiation and (ending) consequences, (whereas) on the other hand SV is an explanation of a psychological state without a clear beginning and ending. Additionally, IAV is more specific for an active event and SV (is) commonly has more generalization for a kind of psychological state. Related to the causality in a sentence, the IAV and SV play the different role in English language expression. Using a depicting sentence (e.g. Person A ___ Person B) to check which person plays a causal role in this sentence, is our approach to examine the causality implicit in interpersonal verbs in this survey. (By) for instance, the sentence is that Person A helps Person B. Following two conclusions which are ¡°this is because of the kind of Person that A (or B) is¡±, the subjects were asked to rate the likelihood of those two conclusions. If the rate of Person A is higher than Person B, the result shows that the greater causal weight is assigned to Person A (sentence subject), i.e. this interpersonal event involving help was primarily attributed to a general disposition in him who helps (Brown & Fish, 1983, p.241). Many experiments have been proved the phenomenon of implicit verb causality. Semin and Fiedler (1991, p.14) had concluded that the certain verbs which can be identified as action verbs (IAV and SAV),( that )convey (the impression) information that the cause of the behavior described in the verb originates is in the sentence subject (in this survey, we used the term of IAV_SA; and the objects in this condition is IAV_OA), whereas other verbs which consist of state verbs (SV) suggest causal attribution to the sentence object (similar as the previous expression, we used SV_SA and SV_OA). The schema theory is an essential theory to analysis the implicit causality in interpersonal verbs. There are in English certain semantic roles (or predicate arguments) coordinated with subject and object (Brown & Fish, 1983, p.241). And two pairs of semantic roles are associated with subject and object in the class verbs under consideration: Agent-Patient and Stimulus-Experiencer (Brown & Fish, 1983, p.241). The definitio...