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Implicit causality has been shown to impact the likelihood of pronominalization of particular referents as well. Previous investigations have noted that besides their actual meaning, certain verbs encode additional aspects about the events they describe (Chafe 1972). These additional aspects include objects, causes and consequences that are typically associated with the event evoked by the verb. For example, when talking about a stealing event, people activate different roles that are typically linked to this event, as “the burglar”, “the loss”, “the insurance” and so forth. Such associations licence the use of the definite article for typical objects, even though they do not refer back to an explicitly introduced antecedent. Not only typical objects are being activated by verb meanings, but also different other events that represent natural continuations of the initial event. In the given example, the cause or the consequence is activated by the verbal meaning as well. This observation was taken as an argument that the verb to steal has an inherent feature of causation. Garvey and Caramazza (1974) argue that implicit causality is one of possibly many aspects of “world knowledge” that speakers and hearers use in communication. Implicit causality enables hearers to correctly assign an ambiguous pronoun towards the object referent in (16a) and towards the subject referent in (16b).

(16)	(a)	Jane1 hit Mary2 because she2 had stolen a tennis racket.
	(b)	Jane1 angered Mary2 because she1 had stolen a tennis racket. Caramazza et al. (1977)

To identify the biases in pronoun assignment, hearers have to correctly compute the causality relations between two events. For example, in (16a) they have to understand that the event described in the first sentence is a reaction towards what Mary did, and in (16b), hearers have to understand that Mary is angered, because Jane stole a tennis racket. Garvey and Caramazza (1974) divided verbs into three classes depending on the direction of pronoun resolution, i.e. whether a pronoun refers back to the first noun phrase of the preceding clause (NP1-bias), whether it refers to the second noun phrase (NP2-bias), or whether it is neutral towards the preceding noun phrases (neutral). Typical English verbs that are biased to the first noun phrase in the preceding context are anger, frighten, delight; verbs that are biased to the second referent are hit, scold, admire; and verbs that are neutral with respect to a particular referent are see, babysit, notice.

Moreover, Au (1986) showed that the way in which the first sentence is continued has an impact upon the referent that will be subsequently mentioned. For example, a full stop after the first sentence and the omission of the subordinating conjunction because has the effect of neutralising or even reversing a particular bias to a noun phrase, as illustrated in (17a). On the contrary, participants who were asked to continue a sentence like the one in example (17b) showed a systematic preference to pick up the first referent (she=Paula) in the subsequent discourse, and the pronoun in the second conjunct was resolved to this subject referent.

(17)	(a)	Paula infuriated Mary. Paula/ Mary _____________.
	(b)	Paula infuriated Mary because shePAULA _________.

Stevenson et al. (1994) accounted for these observations by arguing that subordinating conjunctions like because have a direct impact on the accessibility of referents, making these more susceptible for pronominalization. In sum, implicit causality was shown to be an important factor in pronoun resolution, which is generally resolved at clause boundaries (Koornneef and van Berkum 2006).