Context Coercion in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Chinese
نویسنده
چکیده
This study investigates the on-line processing of context coercion in Mandarin Chinese. Context coercion is a kind of situation shift that is implicitly and contextually governed by the semantic reinterpretation process. We hypothesize that the coercion constructions are syntactically and semantically complicated than transparent sentences and should be more difficult to process. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out to test this hypothesis. The results of the experiment indicate that there is a strong coercion effect in reaction time and coercion constructions are more difficult to process than concord constructions (transparent constructions) in Chinese. This finding is also consistent with the commitment account of sentence processing. In addition, this study provides psycholinguistic evidence that supports a situational account for the meaning of the Chinese aspect marker le: the default meaning of the Chinese aspect marker le is perfectivity when it is used in dynamic situations and its meaning will be inchoativity when it is used in stative situations.
منابع مشابه
The difficulty of coercion: a response to de Almeida.
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