Abstract
Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like ‘begin’ and ‘finish’) with entity nouns (like ‘the book’ or ‘the coffee’) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al. 2001; Traxler et al. 2002; Pickering et al. 2005). This processing cost is widely interpreted as evidence of complement coercion—aspectual verbs semantically select for an event (like ‘dancing’ or ‘the dance’) and can take entity objects only if they are coerced into an event through a computationally costly process of type-shifting (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This paper presents an eye-tracking study of the Canadian English ‘be done NP’ construction, e.g., ‘I am done/finished my homework’ (not to be confused with the dialect-neutral ‘I am done/finished WITH my homework’) to mean ‘I have finished my homework’. Results suggest a processing penalty for entity-denoting nouns like ‘the script’ (compared to event description nouns like ‘the audition’) in this construction, which supports Fruehwald & Myler’s (2015) proposal that ‘done’ and ‘finished’ in this construction are aspectual adjectives that behave like aspectual verbs in requiring complement coercion and type-shifting for entity-denoting nouns.
Highlights
The following table shows a summary of the significant results on each measure
Complement coercion is not modulated by competition
Students participating for course credit were not prescreened for language background
Summary
Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like begin and finish) with entity nouns (like the book or the coffee) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al 2001; Traxler et al 2002; Pickering et al 2005). Note that this paper will be assuming the type-shifting or enriched composition analysis of coercion, in line with the language used by Fruehwald & Myler in their analysis, this experiment was designed to determine whether the Canadian construction exhibits coercion effects, rather than to distinguish between different reasons or explanations for coercion effects (like Traxler et al 2005 and Frisson & McElree 2008 comparing pragmatic and semantic analyses) This experiment tests whether there is a penalty for entity nouns compared to event nouns in the Canadian English be done NP construction and in the dialectneutral be done with NP construction
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