Aspectual Coercion and Logical Polysemy

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Abstract

Recent work in computational semantics and lexical semantics has made an interesting shift.Motivated by a concern for lexical organization and global coherence in the structure of the lexicon, some researchers have moved towards more expressive semantic descriptions, as well as more powerful methods of composition.There has been some concern expressed, however, as to the general applicability of type-changing operations such as coercion, as well as concerning the power of generative mechanisms operating in the lexicon and semantics.In this paper, we address these concerns directly, and show that, upon closer examination, these critiques are not substantiated by the linguistic data.Without a proper notion of constraints on coercion, however, there can indeed be overgeneration of interpretations in the semantics, and in fact the notion of conditions on coercion has always been integral to the basic spirit of generative lexicons.In particular, we examine the constraints on type coercion in complement constructions of aspectual predicates in English and French.What we discover is a natural explanation for the behavior of coercion that makes reference to different types of event selection while also addressing the polysemous nature of aspectual verbs. POLYSEMY AND SEMANTIC EXPRESSIVENESSRecendy, work in computational semantics and lexical semantics has made an interesting shift.Motivated by a concern for lexical organization and global coherence in the structure of the language lexicon, some researchers have moved towards more expressive semantic descriptions, as well as more powerful methods of composition. 1 There has been some concern expressed, however, as to the general applicability of type-changing operations such as coercion, as well as concerning the power of generative mechanisms operating in the lexicon and semantics.In this paper, we address these concerns directly, and show that, upon closer examination, these critiques are not substantiated by the linguistic data.Without a proper notion of constraints on coercion, however, there can indeed be overgeneration of interpretations in the semantics, and in fact, the notion of conditions on coercion has always been integral to the basic spirit of generative lexicons.In particular, we examine the

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