Complement Coercion

Abstract

Although Complement Coercion has been systematically associated with computational cost, there remains a serious confound in the experimental evidence built up in previous studies. The confound arises from the fact that lexico-semantic differences within the set of verbs assumed to involve coercion have not been taken into consideration. From among the set of verbs that have been reported to exhibit complement coercion effects we identified two clear semantic classes - aspectual verbs and psychological verbs. We hypothesize that the semantic difference between the two should result in differing processing profiles. Aspectual predicates (begin) trigger coercion and processing cost while psychological predicates (enjoy) do not. Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment supports our hypothesis. Coercion costs are restricted to aspectual predicates while no such effects are found with psychological predicates. These findings have implications for how these two kinds of predicates might be lexically encoded as well as for whether the observed interpolation of eventive meaning can be attributed to type-shifting (e.g. McElree et al., 2001) or to pragmatic-inferential processes (e.g. De Almeida, 2004).

Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words‐as‐Cues Framework: Evidence From Self‐Paced Reading and Probe Recognition

“…Hence, we excluded the predictor. Note that this result is not contradictory to the findings of Katsika et al (2012), since we did not include verb classes in the design of our study. Different verb classes may still behave differently; but the results of this study are not significantly influenced by this factor.…”

Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-paced Reading and fMRI

“…This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., begin) but not psychological verbs (e.g., enjoy) (Katsika et al 2012), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Piñango and Deo 2015). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual.…”

“…Psycholinguistic studies, using a variety of experimental paradigms, report that combining an entity-denoting complement with a coercion verb (John began the book) engenders more processing cost than combining it with a non-coercion verb (John read/wrote the book) during real-time comprehension (Baggio et al 2010;Frisson and McElree 2008;Katsika et al 2012;Lapata et al 2003;McElree et al 2001McElree et al , 2006Pickering et al 2005Pickering et al , 2006Scheepers et al 2004Scheepers et al , 2008Traxler et al 2002Traxler et al , 2005. On the neurolinguistic side, it has been found that the complement coercion effect recruits three distinct cortical regions: Wernicke's area (Piñango et al 2001), ventro-medial 1 The term coercion is widely used to describe diverse phenomena in which it appears that interpretations are derived despite apparent semantic incongruity or mismatch between the combining expressions.…”

“…Specifically, Katsika et al (2012) observe that the class of coercion verbs investigated in previous studies on complement coercion was not only semantically heterogeneous, including at least two distinctly separable subclasses-aspectual verbs (e.g. begin, finish, start) and psychological verbs (e.g.…”

“…The full class of coercion verbs investigated (in conflated fashion) also includes verbs like master and attempt. See Katsika et al (2012). 4 Here we note that the psychological verb set examined in coercion studies only included a small set of possible psychological verbs guided by the V + V-ing paraphrase diagnostic: John enjoys the book = John enjoys reading the book.…”