Implicit causality, implicit consequentiality and semantic roles

Stewart, Pickering, and Sanford (1998) reported a new type of semantic inference, implicit consequentiality, which they suggest is comparable to, although not directly related to, the well-documented phenomenon of implicit causality. It is our contention that there is a direct relation between these two semantic phenomena but that this relation can only be explained by referring to the notion of semantic roles. In this paper we use Brown and Fish's (1983) analysis of the meaning of interpersonal verbs in terms of semantic roles to substantiate our claim. We conclude that the semantic roles of the individuals associated with an event determine the implicit causal and consequential attributions of certain verbs.