From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality

We present a semantic theory of causal discourse that allows us to derive expectations about upcoming discourse, specifically when to expect various types of explanations. We apply our theory to the phenomenon of implicit causality and show how the semantics of implicit causality verbs interacts with discourse structure. In particular, we show why certain verbs trigger explanations per default, what kind of explanations are triggered, and why these explanations are closely related to specific coreference patterns. Predictions derived from the theory were tested in a large-scale crosslinguistic production study comparing discourse continuations in German and Norwegian—two languages displaying differing discourse structuring properties. The production study fully confirmed our predictions, with explanation types and implicit causality bias distributing as expected. The study furthermore reveals that our semantic account of implicit causality is cross-linguistically valid.

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