Fig. 1: Language system hierarchy and anticipation.

Upward arrows indicate how anticipation projects from cognition to language structures; downward arrows indicate how these structures piggyback on cognitive principles for the production and interpretation of their structures (e.g. the cognitive context, to be defined in section ‘Anticipation and information structure: presuppositions and propositions’; anticipation). The horizontal bar encapsulating the “Anticipation” principle and its types indicates that this is a general cognitive principle; we provide evidence for its neural substrates in Section Anticipation in Cognitive Structure Systems. The horizontal bars encapsulating key Information Structure types (e.g. comment-focus) and Discourse Structure types (e.g. subject–predicate) indicate that these are general linguistic structures which should thus include anticipation as one of their guiding principles.