Distinguishing coercion and underspecification in Type Composition Logic

Abstract

This paper investigates the meaning adaptability of change of state (CoS) verbs. Itargues that both coercion and underspecification are necessary mechanisms in order to properlyaccount for the semantic adaptability observable for CoS verbs in combination with theircomplements. This type of meaning adaptability has received little formal attention to date,although some recent work has already led the way on this topic (Spalek, 2014; Lukassek andSpalek, 2016; Asher et al., 2017). Our paper is part of a cross-linguistic case study of Germaneinfrieren and Spanish congelar (‘freeze’). We model the meaning adaptability of this test casewithin Type Composition Logic (TCL) (Asher, 2011). We build on Asher’s coercion mechanismand introduce an additional mechanism for underspecification that exploits the fine-grained typesystem in TCL.Keywords: lexical semantics, change of state verbs, coercion, underspecification, Type CompositionLogic.