Persistence Conditions of Institutional Entities: Investigating Copredication Through a Forced-Choice Experiment

Abstract

The conditions under which certain complex polysemous nominals can sustain coherent sense relations (informally, can “survive”) is investigated through a two-alternative forced choice experiment. Written scenarios were constructed which permitted copredication, through which multiple, semantically different sense types are associated with a single nominal. Participants were presented with two scenarios involving a polysemous nominal (e.g., bank, city) and had to select which scenario (and, hence, which combination of predicates) appeared to be the most prototypical, faithful realization of the nominal. In order to achieve this, an additional manipulation was added, such that the number of senses hosted by each forced choice was either equal (2 senses choice vs. 2 senses choice) or unequal (1 sense choice vs. 2/3 senses choice). In order to address certain concerns in the literature about prototypicality, a core question addressed was whether the institutional sense of the nominals strongly determined the option chosen by participants, or whether the number of senses more strongly predicted this. It was found that the best predictor of sense “survival” was not sense frequency, but rather sense complexity or approximation to the institutional sense.

Copredication and Complexity Revisited: A Reply to Löhr and Michel

“…(e.g., there is no Dominant-Subordinate sense ordering preference). There is empirical evidence that persistence conditions of institutional entities in copredication are not significantly determined by sense frequency, but rather sense complexity (Murphy, 2021c). These findings are problematic for Löhr and Michel's model, since sense predictability most directly stems from a nominal's sense frequency profile.…”

“…The sense frequency profiles reported in Murphy (2021a) reveal that the expectations/frequencies for BOOK and CITY are not equally balanced between senses, and that frequency has no statistically significant relationship with predicate order acceptability (e.g., there is no Dominant–Subordinate sense ordering preference). There is empirical evidence that persistence conditions of institutional entities in copredication are not significantly determined by sense frequency, but rather sense complexity (Murphy, 2021c). These findings are problematic for Löhr and Michel's model, since sense predictability most directly stems from a nominal's sense frequency profile.…”

“…Löhr and Michel (2022) claim that copredication acceptability is determined by a “set of expectations that are influenced by higher‐order priors associated with discourse context and world knowledge.” I will show that their model encounters a number of obstacles, and ends up unintentionally supporting an alternative model in Murphy (2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c), which they attempt to critique.…”

The paper was boring and long: A reply to Michel and Löhr’s theory of predicate ordering in copredication

“…Going beyond this, in Murphy (2021c) it was shown that what I called the "persistence conditions" for copredication (the conditions under which certain complex polysemous nominals can sustain coherent sense relations in a brief narrative which "takes away" certain senses until the object referred to is reduced in sense number) are also correlated significantly with semantic complexity, not sense frequency. This provides further evidence for the centrality not of prediction, but of semantics (see Murphy 2023bMurphy , 2024a.…”

“…Here, they inaccurately characterize the "experiments by Murphy", which concern basic structures like "The X was P and Q", or "The P and Q X", but also longer sentences with more complex predicates and prepositional phrases. For even more rich contexts, see Murphy (2021c) and the narratives tested in this experimental report. The important point to stress here is that even though M&L characterize ordering effects as obtaining at the sentence level, with "rich context", even basic phrases exhibit the ISC bias.…”