Reanalyzing the Complement Coercion Effect through a Generalized Lexical Semantics for Aspectual Verbs

Coercion verbs have been taken to include not only aspectual verbs like begin, start, and finish but also psychological verbs such as enjoy, endure, and savor and control verbs like try and attempt. Their unifying property has been assumed to be that they select for eventive complements (e.g. John began/enjoyed reading the book/the meeting). On this view, the composition of an entity-denoting expression with any coercion verb obligatorily gives rise to a type-mismatch, which can only be resolved by “coercing” the entity-denoting expression into an event-denoting expression. The experimental literature has presupposed such an event-selecting lexical semantics for all coercion verbs and interpreted processing and neurological phenomena as being reflexes of entity-to-event type-shifting. Recent evidence on the processing properties of coercion verbs however shows that when distinct semantic subclasses of coercion verbs are isolated, out of the two main subclasses (aspectual and psychological verbs), only aspectual verbs trigger the expected processing profile (Katsika et al 2012, Utt., et al., Lai et al., 2014). Crucially, these results call into question the standard account for the increased processing cost observed and in doing so they also call into question the linguistic analysis that gives rise to such an account. To address this issue, we focus on aspectual verbs and provide a new lexical semantic analysis of aspectual verbs. On this analysis, aspectual verbs lexically select for structured individuals – entities that can be construed as one-dimensional directed path structures (Krifka 1998) in some ontological dimension. This analysis has wide empirical coverage: it accounts for the full range of complements that aspectual verbs legitimately combine with in their transitive uses, and it does so without appealing to any coercive entity-to-event type-shifting operations. Finally, the analysis allows for a simpler, conceptually grounded interpretation of the observed processing cost as being a result of exhaustive lexical retrieval (on the verb) and ambiguity resolution (on the complement).