The principle of anticipation in language use

Anticipation is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the beliefs or desires of cognitive agents with respect to the world surrounding them, and that can influence the behaviour and decisions of such agents. This paper addresses the status and the role of anticipation in the shaping of language structures. We sketch a preliminary theoretical framework for anticipation in language and linguistic research. Anticipation is presented as a neural mechanism that projects as a principle shaping cognitive processes. Anticipation is then shown to permeate a three-level architecture also shaping language use: the underlying cognitive structure, the middle-level information structure, and the surface discourse structure. It is suggested that anticipation in language may explicitly emerge as a relation between the informational (i.e. propositional and presuppositional) content of clauses and sentences. It is then suggested that anticipation plays a role across different language structures (e.g. subject–predicate and topic-comment structures; sentence types and multi-clausal discourses) and via different categories (e.g. Discourse Markers such as sentential adverbs, discourse connectives). It is proposed that this framework can capture several well-studied but recalcitrant linguistic phenomena in a unified manner by offering a model of how anticipations shape language use. The paper introduces preliminary evidence in support of these claims. First, clauses can minimally introduce anticipations as agents’ expectations about sentences and their content. Second, discourse structures can modulate anticipations without the explicit presence of categories expressing these anticipations (e.g. Discourse Markers). When present, however, these categories must match the anticipation types that relations between sentences express. It is thus suggested that anticipation patterns can emerge in language as conceptual/rhetorical relations in discourse. The paper concludes by discussing the consequences of our proposal for linguistic theories that address the topic of anticipation in language and cognition.