It would be helpful to have such formulations, models of the mental model, so to speak. Such models would advance theory development and experimentation on mental models, much as they have done in other disciplines. The advantage of the companion representations, especially propositional text bases, is that they are empirically tractable. I worry that minimalists and nonminimalists may both be right, and that we may have overlooked a critical dimension of inference making, namely, the cost-benefit dimension. The benefit is the information the reader gains from reading.
Costs result from the mental effort required by inferences.
Adding the cost-benefit continuum complicates matters, much as it has in psychophysics and in research on speeded performance. For example, rather than asking what the constraints are on inferences in reading, investigators would ask what the constraints are for a given point on the cost-benefit continuum. Part of the appeal of minimalism lies in the minimal theoretical overhead used to account for a corpus of data. It has proven to be a fertile stimulant for research as well. Mental models contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension.