To Coerce or Not to Coerce: A Corpus-based Exploration of Some Complement Coercion Verbs in Chinese

This study takes a corpus-based approach to examine twenty Chinese verbs that have been found to coerce their NP complements into an event type (cf. Lin et al. 2009), with an aim of creating a coercion profile for each verb. A cluster analysis is further conducted on the coercion profiles. The resulting clusters in our analysis show a bi-directional distribution: the verbs in Cluster 1 are found to coerce their complements more frequently, while the verbs in Cluster 2 are found to coerce more noun types. Moreover, many lexical pairs (e.g., antonyms and near-synonyms) are identified in the two clusters. Our quantitative analysis suggests that semantically related verbs can have similar coercion profiles. The empirical findings of the present study complement intuition-based studies on the complement coercion operation in Chinese (e.g., Lin and Liu 2004, Liu 2003) and shed new light on the theoretical framework of the