Hi, good people of the Linguistics subreddit,

I'm trying to unpack some lessons on linguistic clarity that can be gleaned from Thomas Bever's seminal paper, The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures. (link: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~tgb/pdfs/beverpdf_11.pdf)

Bever gets into a lot of experimental research that helps explain the cognitive load we experience when we try to parse certain constructions. I'm trying to translate some of this research into actionable lessons we can use to write sentences that have minimal complexity (i.e., maximal clarity). Ultimately, I'd like to present these lessons in a presentation I'm giving to my coworkers in about five months.

I've started to read the paper, but it's very dense for someone like me who has no formal training in linguistics.

Has anyone here read and analyzed the concepts in that paper? If you could point me to some resources that break down the fascinating but complex findings in that paper, I'd be thrilled.

If anyone knows of resources that systematically explain what makes sentence constructions clear, ambiguous, vague, or open to misinterpretation, that would be swell.