Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena

Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena * Dani~le Godard CNRS, Universit6 Paris 7, UFRL case 7003, 2 Place Jussieu 75005 Paris France godard@parisT.jussieu.fr Jacques Jayez EHESS-CELITH 54 Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris France jayez~divsun.unige.ch Abstract The interpretation of coercion construc- tions (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 predi- cate. We show that this procedure encoun- ters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the co- ercion interpretation results both from gen- eral semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. The solu- tion is formulated in the HPSG formalism, where the lexical description of heads in- cludes a specification of the argument and articulates syntax and semantics. We pro- pose that the properties attached to the complement remain the same as they are oustside the construction, but that the se- mantics of the predicate is enriched to in- clude 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 para- phrase, and the type that the argument has outside *We are indebted to Anne Abeilld, Nicolas Asher, Michel Aurnague, Andrde Borillo, Annie Delaveau, Jean Marie Marandin, Jean-Pierre Mantel, Alex Lascarides, Patrick Saint-Dizier, Annie Zaenen and our referees for helpful comments, criticisms and suggestions. the construction. This traditionM problem has been recently rephrased within type theory, where types (like e for events, p for material objects, ~¢ for kinds, etc.) classify the domain of entities (cf. [Bach, 1986; Carlson, 1977; Chierchia, 1984]). Pustejovsky pro- poses in particular that the mismatch is solved by the operation of "type coercion" (cf.[Pustejovsky, 1991; Pustejovsky and Anick, 1988; Boguraev and Puste- jovsky, 1991]). In essence, it confers to the predicate the ability to change the argument type. For ex- ample, the sequence in (1) is accounted for in the following way: (1) John began the book. The predicate associated with begin requires that the argument corresponding to the complement be an event (type e). Since the type associated with book is different (we will suppose it is "material object", p) it is coerced to e. Accordingly, (1) is given an event reading, which, in this case, is associated with two possible interpretations: "John began to read the book", and "John began to write the book". This is an interesting way of looking at the phe- nomenon, and typing certainly plays a crucial role in building a coercion interpretation. However, the hypothesis of type coercion itself is not supported by linguistic evidence, and is not sufficiently con- strained to account for the impossibility of some com- binations. Instead of type change on the argument, we propose an …

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