A Study of Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from an Acceptability Judgment Task

Abstract

AbstractThis study explores whether or not Mandarin sentences with complement coercion are acceptable to native speakers. Complement coercion is a phenomenon in which some event-selecting verbs (e.g., begin), which semantically select an event-denoting complement, can occur with an entity-denoting complement (e.g., Mary began the book). While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in English, it is debatable whether complement coercion sentences are also available in Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, Mandarin speakers were invited to rate the acceptability of coercion sentences composed of aspectual verbs with entity-denoting complements (e.g., 完成这篇文章 ‘finished (writing/reading) the article’), and non-coercion counterparts (e.g., 翻译这篇文章 ‘translate the article’). Results show that the coercion sentences are generally acceptable to native speakers of Mandarin. The results support previous findings in relevant studies on Mandarin, and further provide cross-linguistic evidence for this universal phenomenon.KeywordsComplement coercionMandarin ChineseAcceptability ratings