On semantic underspecification in English and Mandarin ‘BEFORE/AFTER’+NEC constructions

Abstract

This paper presents an underspecification account of type mismatch in English and Mandarin Chinese ‘BEFORE/AFTER’+non-event-complement (NEC) constructions, with a view to uncovering the mechanisms underlying the semantic well-formedness of type mismatch in surface structure. As this construction is used to locate an event on the time axis, it requires a point of time complement. The study finds that when the complement slot, which is typically filled by a telic event or a time phrase, is filled by NECs (artifact nouns, proper nouns, kin terms, pronominals or number-classifiers), the construction will coerce the NECs into telic events from which a point in time could be derived; and in that meaning enrichment process, the NECs are semantically underspecified. The research suggests that type coercion does not solely operate at the level of lexical semantics in that many cases of type coercion are more conventionalized and more contextualized than lexical. Therefore, other factors such as world knowledge, linguistic context and conventionality have to be taken into consideration in order to get an adequate account of the phenomenon. Based on the mechanisms uncovered, the paper makes a formal description of the syntactic process in which type coercion works, and builds a usage-based hierarchy of proneness to type coercion for English and Mandarin NECs.