Doing It Again and Again May Be Difficult, But It Depends on What You Are Doing

Sentence interpretation is integrating the information of incoming lexical items into a coherent whole. But often the pieces of information do not fit together and have to be shifted in meaning to confirm with the rest of the sentence. These shifts are called coercion (Moens & Steedman, 1988; Pustejovsky, 1995). There is a growing body of experimental work that investigates the processing consequences of two different coercion phenomena: complement coercion (e.g. McElree et al., 2001) and aspectual coercion (for a review see Pylkkänen & McElree, 2006). Aspectual coercion itself encompasses a number of different types which have been systematically described in a seminal paper by Moens & Steedman (1988). Consider the examples in (1-a) to (1-d).