Table 1 Initial examples introducing anticipation patterns.

From: The principle of anticipation in language use

Example number

Example (structural type)

Anticipation type; Markers

(1)

We made a promise and I kept it because it’s gonna save lives. (Multi-clausal sentence)

Pro-anticipation; and, because (Traugott, 2022: Ch. 1; McHugh, 2023)

(2)

Everybody was hoping Adele would come but she stayed away. (Multi-clausal sentence).

Counter-anticipation; But (Ippolito, Kiss & Williams, 2022)

  1. All the examples in this paper originate in the COCA corpus of Contemporary American (Davies, 2008 -current). Please see Supplementary file A for more details regarding each example. We use tables to discuss examples for two reasons. The first reason is that we can present the key information for our analysis that the examples provide in a principled manner. The left column presents examples’ (continuous) numbers. The central column presents the actual examples plus the grammatical type they instantiate (i.e. mono-clausal or multi-clausal sentence, or multi-sentence discourse). The right column presents the anticipation type (pro-anticipation, counter-anticipation) and the Discourse Markers explicitly realising the type. For each Discourse Marker, we also provide some references supporting our analysis regarding their anticipation type. We fully define structural types and anticipation types in sections ‘Anticipation: definitions and role in cognition’, ‘Anticipation in cognitive structure systems’, ‘Anticipation and information structure: presuppositions and propositions’, and ‘Anticipation and discourse structure’, once we present our architecture. The second reason is that corpus examples can be relatively long; their insertion in tables allows us to maintain the prose compact and within length requirements.
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