A cognitive psychological model of linguistic intuitions: Polysemy and predicate order effects in copredication sentences

Abstract

Copredication is the phenomenon that two or more predicates can jointly apply to the same argument. In “The book is heavy and informative” the word book seems to refer to both a concrete physical object that can be heavy and an abstract content that can be informative. It has been observed that if the concrete sense of the nominal is triggered first, the copredication statement often sounds better compared to when the abstract sense is triggered first. However, the cognitive underpinnings of this effect are not well understood. In this theoretically oriented paper, we propose a predictive processing model of order effects aimed at advancing our understanding of that phenomenon. We also connect the debate regarding ordering preferences with an existing strand of research on ordering preferences in multi-adjective strings and the information structure of sentences.