tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena"

The interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. . | Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena Daniele Godard CNRS Université Paris 7 UFRL case 7003 2 Place Jussieu 75005 Paris France godard@ Jacques Jayez EHESS-CELITH 54 Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris France jayez@ Abstract The interpretation of coercion constructions to begin a book has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance a phrase of type o object is coerced to a phrase of type e event under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin commencer case we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. The solution is formulated in the HPSG formalism where the lexical description of heads includes a specification of the argument and articulates syntax and semantics. We propose that the properties attached to the complement remain the same as they are oustside the construction but that the semantics of the predicate is enriched to include an abstract predicate of which the complement is an argument. 1 Introduction Predicates require that their arguments be of a given type. However as is well-known certain acceptable constructions exhibit a mismatch between the type of the argument as constructed from a possible paraphrase and the type that the argument has outside We are indebted to Anne Abeillé Nicolas Asher Michel Aurnague Andree Borillo Annie Delaveau Jean Marie Marandin Jean-Pierre Maurel Alex Lascarides Patrick Saint-Dizier Annie Zaenen and our referees for helpful comments criticisms and suggestions. the construction. This traditional problem has been recently rephrased within type theory where types like e for events fi for material objects K for kinds etc. classify the domain of entities cf. Bach 1986 Carlson 1977 Chierchia 1984 . Pustejovsky proposes in particular that .