Coercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the most extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literatu...

What does the capacity to consent to treatment entail and what factors influence it? To date, most research has focussed on individual factors that impair capacity to consent to treatment, such as intelligence, cognitive capacity and symptoms of mental illness. In this presentation, I want to explore the social and interpersonal factors that influence capacity to consent. I discuss the complexi...

In this article the author argues that involuntary psychiatric interventions are inherently dangerous and potentially harmful to their subjects, thus challenging the Hippocratic ethical principle of "first do no harm." Damages arising from coercion in common clinical situations are analyzed, as well as the motives of psychiatrists for persistently promoting an expansion of involuntary intervent...

Type clash and coercion in logical metonymy Logical metonymy (begin the book → begin writing the book) has traditionally been accounted for by means of type-shift: according to these theories (Pustejovsky 1995), the type clash between the event-selecting verb (begin) and the entity-denoting object (book) triggers a coercion mechanism that shifts the type of the object into an event (book → writ...

Background The use of coercion in the treatment of persons with serious mental illness is a long debated strategy to gain adherence to treatment for persons believed to be cognitively impaired by their illness. This article examines the psychometric properties of a scale developed to measure perception of coercion. Using a psychometrically sound scale found to be both reliable and valid in a sp...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between childhood experiences of sexual abuse, sexual coercion during adolescence, and the acquisition of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in a population of homeless adolescents. METHOD Homeless adolescent females (N = 216) from a northwestern United States city were recruited by street outreach workers for a longitudinal study of STI epidemiology....

In many European countries, providing a suspect in custody with legal aid before the first police interrogation is a heavily debated issue. In this paper, we report on an exploratory study on the use of coercion by the police and the use of the right to silence by suspects in 70 Dutch homicide cases and their relation to prior consultation and presence of a lawyer. Analysis of the data indicate...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease of the motor system with subtle adverse effects on cognition. It is still unclear whether ALS also affects language and semantics, and if so, what aspects and processes exactly. We investigated how ALS patients understand verb phrases modified by temporal preposition phrases, e.g., "To watch TV for half an hour." Interpretation ...