Flexible Semantics for Reinterpretation Phenomena

By " reinterpretation " Egg means to include various phenomena hitherto treated separately: metonymy (Amelie labeled the wine, i.e., bottles of wine; All the tenors are on the top shelf, i.e., CDs of tenors), where either semantic mismatch or contextual implausibility cause us to do some reasoning in order to arrive at a likely interpretation; examples of the type enjoy the book discussed in the generative lexicon literature (Pustejovsky 1995); ambiguous adjectival modification of agentives such as beautiful dancer (one who dances beautifully or a beautiful one who dances); and the various types of coercion encountered in aspectual composition, where a sentence like John sneezed is taken to refer to a single event, whereas John sneezed for five minutes is most naturally interpreted as referring to a sequence of sneezing events. An important contribution of this book to the literature on aspectual coercion is a distinction between two kinds of reinterpretation. The first kind is like the sneezing example where the reinterpretation can be succinctly described formally via the inter-position of a type-shifting operator between the temporal modifier and the whole global event complex. The second kind is what Egg calls " landing site " coercion, where some internal component of the verbal event complex is augmented and made the object of the temporal modifier; for example, Joe hired a car for a week, where for a week describes the duration of the result of the hiring event rather than the hiring event itself. The two types of coercion, Egg points out, can differ in their entailment properties. Amelie played the sonata, in a neutral context, entails that she completed it. Amelie played the sonata for an hour can have either an iterative or a progressive reading. On the progressive reading, famously, it is not entailed that Amelie played (i.e., completed) the sonata. However, in an example of " landing site " coercion like Amelie left for an hour the entailment that Amelie left is preserved. Notice that on the iterative reading of the sonata example, however, the perfective entailment that Amelie completed the sonata (at least once, possibly several times) is preserved: The diagnostic is only conclusive for cases like the progressive coercion. The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 is a survey of previous work in all types of aspectual, nominal, and verbal coercion. Egg's discussion is fair and sympathetic, though not uncritical; he argues, …