The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across languages should show similar pronoun resolution effects, but these claims run contrary to recent analyses on which much of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is susceptible to cross-cultural variation, and in fact there is little data in the literature to decide the question one way or another. Analysis of data in eight languages representing four historically unrelated language families reveals consistent pronoun resolution biases for emotion verbs, suggesting that the information upon which implicit causality pronoun resolution biases are derived is stable across languages and cultures.

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be mapped onto syntactic subjects), not all verbs fit neatly into these generalizations. One particularly striking example is verbs of psychological state: The experiencer of the state can appear as either the subject (Agnes fears/hates/loves Bartholomew) or the direct object (Agnes frightens/angers/delights Bartholomew). The present studies explore whether this apparent variability in subject/object mapping may actually result from differences in these verbs’ underlying meanings. Specifically, we suggest that verbs like fear describe a habitual attitude towards some entity whereas verbs like frighten describe an externally caused emotional episode. We find that this distinction systematically characterizes verbs in English, Mandarin, and Korean. This pattern is generalized to novel verbs by adults in English, Japanese, and Russian, and even by English-speaking children who are just beginning to acquire psych verbs. This results support a broad role for systematic mappings between semantics and syntax in language acquisition.