Predicate order and coherence in copredication

Abstract

This article proposes that predicate order and coherence relations are the two major determining factors in copredication licensing, resolving a long-standing puzzle over the criteria for constructing acceptable copredications. The effects of predicate ordering are claimed to be anchored around semantic complexity, such that copredications with semantically Simple-Complex predicate orderings are more acceptable than the reverse. This motivates a parsing bias, termed Incremental Semantic Complexity. Particular ways of implementing this parsing bias are discussed. The effect of predicate coherence is claimed to be anchored around a sense of causality and featural commonality. Lastly, a hierarchy of possible copredications is outlined (the Copredication Hierarchy), helping to delimit the modelling of copredications to a greater extent than has previously been possible.

Copredication in Context: A Predictive Processing Approach

“…An explanation of the differences in intuition that our model captures likely boils down to differences in experience, for example, exposure to this or similar sentences. Murphy (2021aMurphy ( , 2021b) suggested that we can explain this asymmetry by parsing preferences: We prefer to process first simpler and then more complex semantic structures. 18 This suggestion is prima facie quite plausible (not least because it follows some commonsense principle of "incremental effort").…”

“…Finally, for another illustration of how package‐external priors can influence felicitousness judgments, consider so‐called “predicate order effects” in copredication (e.g., Murphy, 2021a , 2021b ; Ortega Andrés, 2020 ; Ortega Andrés & Vicente, 2019 ). Such order effects involve two statements with the same predications (and hence associated senses of the nominal) but in inverted orders.…”

“…In Section 3 , we introduce the core ideas of the PP framework and propose an account of “information packages” in the form of “expectation hierarchies.” In Section 4 , we cover cases of felicitous and infelicitous copredications and discuss the context sensitivity of felicitousness judgments. We also briefly discuss coprediction order effects (Murphy, 2021a , 2021b ) and how they can be modeled with our framework.…”

Patterns of Polysemy and Homonymy in Contextualised Language Models

“…Investigating order effects in our co-predication samples revealed that only 1 of 229 pairwise comparisons between the acceptability scores of copredication structures with different predicate orderings passed the Bonferroni corrected significance level of 0.00021. We therefore argue that our samples are free from any secondary acceptability factors based on predication order (Murphy, 2021), and therefore indeed primarily test for the acceptability of invoking different senses of the target words. Based on this observation, we again combine results before further analysis.…”

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

“…All of these effects are clearly present in a particular instantiation of polysemy known as copredication , whereby multiple, semantically different sense types are associated with a single nominal (“Lunch was delicious but was delayed”; “The newspaper that I held this morning has been sued”). Progressing on from recent research into the acceptability dynamics of copredication ( Murphy, 2019 , 2021a , b ) and possible lower-level accounts ( Murphy, 2018 , 2020 ), I will investigate what I will term the persistence conditions of copredication, making close contact with the nature of prototypical copredications. The main research question addressed will be: What are the conditions under which the identity of a given entity can survive?…”