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

For the last 25 years, (type) coercion — and related notions such as type shifting (Partee and Rooth 1983), accommodation (Goldberg 1995), enriched composition (Jackendoff 1997), forçage (Gadet et al. 1984) and implicit conversion (Talmy 1988) — has been a much debated topic in the linguistic literature.1 It has been typically invoked to account for textbook examples such as Example (1). (See below for further examples of the wide range of applications of the notion)

[1]  M M Piñango,et al.  Real-Time Processing Implications of Enriched Composition at the Syntax–Semantics Interface , 1999, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[2]  Liina Pylkkänen,et al.  Mismatching Meanings in Brain and Behavior , 2008, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[3]  G. Nunberg.  The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy , 1979 .

[4]  Ricardo Mairal Usón,et al.  Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: an introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model , 2008 .

[5]  Neil Cohn,et al.  Electrophysiological Correlates of Complement Coercion , 2010, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[6]  Ernie Lepore,et al.  The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Reflections on James Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon , 1998, Linguistic Inquiry.

[7]  A. Rousseau,et al.  Problèmes de sémantique et de syntaxe , 2007 .

[8]  Hans C. Boas,et al.  A Constructional Approach to Resultatives , 2003 .

[9]  Leonard Talmy,et al.  The relation of grammar to cognition , 1986 .

[10]  Liina Pylkkänen,et al.  Processing events: Behavioral and neuromagnetic correlates of Aspectual Coercion , 2008, Brain and Language.

[11]  Barbara B. Levin,et al.  English verb classes and alternations , 1993 .

[12]  D. Ziegeler.  Count-mass coercion, and the perspective of time and variation , 2010 .

[13]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  The Architecture of the Language Faculty , 1996 .

[14]  A. Goldberg,et al.  The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions , 2004 .

[15]  Laura A. Michaelis.  Type shifting in construction grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion* , 2004 .

[16]  P. Lauwers.  The nominalization of adjectives in French: From morphological conversion to categorial mismatch , 2008 .

[17]  A. Goldberg.  The nature of generalization in language , 2009 .

[18]  Laura A. Michaelis.  Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning , 2002 .

[19]  Johannes Dölling,et al.  Semantische Form und pragmatische Anreicherung: Situationsausdrücke in der Äußerungsinterpretation , 2005 .

[20]  Liina Pylkkänen,et al.  An MEG Study of Silent Meaning , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[21]  James Pustejovsky,et al.  The Generative Lexicon , 1995, CL.

[22]  H. Aït-Kaci.  A lattice theoretic approach to computation based on a calculus of partially ordered type structures (property inheritance, semantic nets, graph unification) , 1984 .

[23]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Temporal Ontology and Temporal Reference , 1988, CL.

[24]  Samuel Bayer,et al.  Metaphoric Generalization through Sort Coercion , 1991, ACL.

[25]  Elaine J. Francis,et al.  Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar , 2003 .

[26]  Elizabeth Closs Traugott,et al.  The concepts of constructional mismatch and type-shifting from the perspective of grammaticalization , 2007 .

[27]  Danièle Godard,et al.  Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena , 1993, EACL.

[28]  Francisco Gonzálvez-García.  The Family of Object-Related Depictives in English and Spanish: Towards a Usage-Based Constructionist Analysis. , 2009 .

[29]  Mats Rooth,et al.  Generalized Conjunction and Type Ambiguity , 2008 .

[30]  R. Langacker.  Cognitive (Construction) Grammar , 2009 .