title: The effect of connectives on the selection of arguments: implicit consequentiality bias for the connective "but".
abstract: Recent studies about the implicit causality of inter-personal verbs showed a symmetric implicit consequentiality bias for psychological verbs. This symmetry is less clear for action verbs because the verbs assigning the implicit cause to the object argument (e.g. "Peter protected John because he was in danger.") tend to assign the implicit consequence to the same argument (e.g. "Peter protected John so he was not hurt."). We replicated this result by comparing continuations of inter-personal events followed by a causal connective "because" or a consequence connective "so". Moreover, we found similar results when the consequence connective was replaced by a contrastive connective "but". This result was confirmed in a second experiment where we measured the time required to imagine a consistent continuation for a fragment finishing with "but s/he ...". The results were consistent with a contrastive connective introducing a denial of a consequence of the previous event. The results were consistent with a model suggesting that thematic roles and connectives can predict preferred co-reference relations.
authors: Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l'Apprentissage (CERCA), Laboratoire CERCA, CNRS UMR 7295, 5 rue Theodore Lefebvre, 86000 , Poitiers, France, francois.rigalleau@univ-poitiers.fr.
authors: François
authors: F
authors: Rigalleau
authors: Michèle
authors: M
authors: Guerry
authors: Lionel
authors: L
authors: Granjon
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics
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