ROLE OF LITERALNESS (IN VISUALIZATION) IN SENTENCE-UNDERSTANDING

Consider this sentence - John was filling water into the jar. Now, it occurs to us that John must be filling water FROM SOMETHING into the jar. The key here (as discussed before) is visualization. Even if you go by the possibility-gauging procedure discussed before, you still spot the lacuna at the level of the visualization only - of a connection/link (John ---filling---> water). The point is that there is also a LITERAL construction step of the components of the sentence that happens. It is only when you try to connect ‘John’, ‘filling’ and ‘water’, by trying to visualize “John filling (with his hands ( which comes with the definition of filling)) water” LITERALLY, that you realize that the water needs to be held by something. (And this very specific realization is obviously because of the commonsense knowledge of gravity/support that gets invoked in the aforesaid mental process - literal visualization). So now we have so far discussed 3 mental conceptual elements of sentence-understanding (they might be overlapping each other) - Visualization Literalness Possibility-gauging Question about a different topic - ‘commonsense’ - arising from the above discussion : Consider this sentence - John was riding a bicycle. Here we commonsensically understand and assume that obviously John was riding the bicycle on the ground (or some base). But this doesn't “occur to us”, like it occurs to us that John must be filling water FROM SOMETHING into the jar (when given the earlier sentence) even though the basis for that too is commonsense. Why so? My guess is that in the earlier sentence, there was “a jar being filled with water into”. So there was a need for a “‘complement’ to the jar, from where the water was filled” for the completion of the story. Also the bicycle scenario is much more commonplace in terms of riding a bicycle ON A GROUND/BASE than that of filling water into a jar FROM SOMETHING. The basis of the invocation of the complement to the jar, as well as that of the mental-picture-building of the ‘ground’ were both commonsense. But the mental processes in which commonsense was invoked were different. This tells us something basic although noteworthy about commonsense-knowledge-invoking. It is that there is “specific/instantial” intervention of commonsense in some cases where the scenario is unique/specific, versus that in more general scenarios in others. The piece of commonsense is the same - gravity - but the scenarios in which it got invoked were opposite. In the first case, it “occurs to us”, in the latter it gets passively assumed.