‘Saved by the reflexive’

Abstract

This paper argues for the existence of a dynamic interaction between constructional polysemy and coercion in shaping lower-level configurations of the subjective-transitive construction in English and Spanish. In particular, a fine-grained analysis is provided of those configurations featuring coercion via a reflexive pronoun in the object slot. The corpus-based analysis provided here shows that the verbs in question, regardless of their inherent lexical semantics, are construed in this construction as expressing a personal assessment by the subject/speaker about himself/herself, thus providing incontrovertible evidence for a constructionist analysis of the type invoked here. Moreover, the coercion effects examined here lend further credence to the construction-specific and also language-specific nature of constructions, especially in the light of instances of the reflexive subjective-transitive construction after saber ('know') in Spanish. This paper also suggests that the explanatory power of the anatomy of a given construction can be further maximized if the morphosyntactic properties of the XPCOMP are mapped onto their inherent meaning properties.

Coercion: Definition and challenges, current approaches, and new trends

“…This does not come as a surprise, as since the first appearance of the term coercion in the field of logical semantics (Moens and Steedman 1988), a term coined by analogy with type coercion in programming languages (Aït-Kaci 1984) -and preceded by the concept of type shifting in the work of Partee and Rooth (1983) -, coercion phenomena have been a major topic in formal (especially generative) syntax and semantics (such as Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). More recently, it has been widely discussed in Construction Grammar, both from a formal and cognitive perspective (Goldberg 1995, Michaelis 2003, Boas 2003, Gonzálvez-García 2007). Moreover, considerable evidence for coercion has been gathered in several psycholinguistic (as Piñango et al 1999) and neurolinguistic studies (Pylkkänen and McElree 2007;Brennan and Pylkkänen 2008;Pylkkänen 2008;2 Kuperberg et al 2010).…”

Cognitive Construction Grammar works

“…A.E.G: I do agree that it's often illuminating to compare constraints in different languages on the "same" construction, as your own elegant work on English and Spanish's small clause constructions has done (Gonzálvez-García, 2007. Typological work is the foundation for our theorizing and so is hugely important.…”

Items and Generalizations: Evidence from <i>Decir</i> within the Family of Subjective-Transitive Constructions in Spanish

“…In other words, the verba dicendi which occur in this construction (see Table 4) are invariably construed as considerar ('consider')-type verbs, regardless of whether their inherent lexical semantics encodes little or no evaluation at all, thus providing incontrovertible empirical evidence for the priority of constructional semantics over lexical semantics. Thus, it is possible to regard configurations like (24)-(25) as instances of the reflexive subjective-transitive construction (see further Gonzálvez-García 2007;, which can be characterized as follows:…”