title: The Semantic Processing of Motion Verbs: Coercion or Underspecification?
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.
authors.affiliation: German Department, Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 50, Tübingen, Germany. julia.lukassek@uni-tuebingen.de.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lukassek
authors.affiliation: SFB 833, Universität Tübingen, Nauklerstraße 35, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Prysłopska
authors.affiliation: SFB 833, Universität Tübingen, Nauklerstraße 35, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Robin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hörnig
authors.affiliation: German Department, Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 50, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Maienborn
mesh_terms: D003068:Coercion; D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Aspectual coercion; Motion verbs; Semantic processing; Underspecification