The main aim of this paper is to show that the notion of the ’self-serving bias’, well established in social psychological research, may have an impact on the way in which speakers verbalise certain experiences. I hypothesise that this perceptual bias will interact with other factors; specifically, gender stereotypes (as defined by psychologists and linguists) and modesty (as defined in linguistic pragmatics). I present corpus evidence for the relevance of the self-serving bias and the complex interplay with gender stereotypes and modesty, based on variation between three different causative constructions (CAUSE, X MAKE Y happen, and X BRING about Y) as well as the use of the adverbs cleverly and stupidly. In both cases, my analysis focuses on the cooccurrence with personal pronoun subjects — specifically, differences in terms of person (first vs third) and gender (masculine vs feminine). The most general conclusion I draw is that cognitive (socio-)linguists may be able to formulate interesting new research questions based on concepts drawn from (social) psychology but that constructs developed within linguistics remain highly relevant as well.

This chapter presents evidence based on typological data, corpora and an artificial language learning experiment that supports the claim that form–meaning correspondences in causative constructions are best explained by the Principle of Communicative Efficiency. Other accounts which involve iconicity and productivity as explanatory factors are less successful in predicting and explaining the famous correlation between formal and semantic integration of events in causative constructions. Moreover, this account explains other form–meaning correspondences beyond event integration and the distinction between direct and indirect causation, such as intentional or accidental causation. Finally, this account predicts correctly the emergence of efficient formal asymmetries in an artificial language learning experiment.