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An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or typically play a role in. We used short stimulus onset asynchrony priming to demonstrate that (1) event nouns prime people (sale–shopper) and objects (trip–luggage) commonly found at those events; (2) location nouns prime people/animals (hospital–doctor) and objects (barn–hay) commonly found at those locations; and (3) instrument nouns prime things on which those instruments are commonly used (key–door), but not the types of people who tend to use them (hose–gardener). The priming effects are not due to normative word association. On our account …