|
|
REAL-TIME EVIDENCE FOR SEMANTIC
COERCION
Brian McElree (NYU) Thursday, February 7, 5:30 PM MJH Rm 126 (Co-sponsored with SPLaT!) To what degree are the meanings of natural language expressions compositional? Strongly compositional approaches to meaning maintain that each operation of semantic composition corresponds to an operation of syntactic composition, so that the interpretation of an expression can be fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and by the syntactic way the constituents are combined. Expressions containing syntax-semantic mismatches challenge strong compositionality, as they may require semantic operations that do not correspond to syntactic operations. The pairing of an aspectual verb, such as begin or finish, with a non-event-denoting object (e.g., ...began the book or ...finished the beer) has been argued to contain one type of syntax-semantic mismatch. The interpretation such verb phrases has been hypothesized to involve a process of complement coercion, a non-syntactic process that converts the entity-denoting object into an event description that satisfies the selectional demands of the verb. I will present studies using a variety of real-time processing measures (self-paced reading and eye-tracking measures, magnetoencephalographic [MEG] patterns, and speed/accuracy trade-off measures) that (1) show that expressions hypothesized to involve complement coercion are indeed more taxing to process than expressions with transparent syntax-semantic mappings (including expressions involving metonymies, such as ...read Dickens) and (2) suggest that the observed processing costs reflect the operations involved in building an event description to resolve the semantic type mismatch between the verb and object. Time permitting, I will discuss differences between complement coercion and other types of syntax-semantic mismatches, which do not engender the same type of processing cost. 
|