What happens when you cocktail your guests? On the processing and acceptability of innovative denominal verbs

Polysemy is a phenomenon in which a single word form has multiple related senses. It can be cross-categorial, that is, the related senses can occur across word categories, such as noun, verb and/or adjective with the same root (e.g. ‘stone’). One source of cross-categorial polysemy is speakers’ innovative use of nouns as verbs (e.g. ‘porch the newspaper’). The meanings of such innovative or unconventional uses have been argued to be pragmatically inferred in context. Taking an experimental approach, we explored whether grasping the meaning of such lexical innovations is typically effort-demanding and whether this process is influenced by cognitive or linguistic individual differences. The results showed that processing innovative denominal verbs is indeed effortful. In addition, people who are more sensitive to or aware of linguistic variation seem to have less difficulty processing innovative verbal uses of nouns, but individual differences in cognitive flexibility did not influence this process. These results provide evidence for an individual differences-based approach to language processing and show that experiential factors, rather than different degrees of cognitive flexibility, can explain differences in pragmatic inferencing required for processing non-conventional polysemy.