Abstract
Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or coercion. This paper argues that this theoretical dispute can be settled experimentally. The test case are standard motion verbs (e.g. walk, ride) in combination with ±telic directional phrases, for which both underspecifaction and coercion analyses have been proposed in the literature. A self-paced reading study which incorporates motion verbs, directional phrases and durative/completive temporal adverbials (1) aims at determining the aspectual value of such verbs, and (2) compares the hypotheses of the Underspecification and Coercion Accounts. The results of the reading time experiment (flanked by a corpus study and a completion study) indicate that motion verbs are aspectually underspecified. They combine with ±telic directional phrases with equal ease. The combination with a mismatching temporal adverbial is an instance of coercion, causing additional processing costs.
Highlights
Coercion and underspecification are two prominent mechanisms of meaning adaptation
The results indicate that the combination of a standard motion verb and an ambiguous directional phrase results in an underspecified verbal phrase
Convergent evidence is provided by the missing increase in reading times on the directional phrase, which would be expected if a lexically atelic motion verb combines with a telic directional phrase
Summary
Coercion and underspecification are two prominent mechanisms of meaning adaptation. Coercion provides a contextually licensed repair of a combinatorial conflict and standardly involves a grammatically ill-formed structure (cf Asher 2011; Pustejovsky 2011). Underspecification relates to a contextually driven specification of a grammatically wellformed, yet underspecified structure (cf Bierwisch 1982, 1983; Egg 2005). The German Department, Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 50, Tübingen, Germany
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