8 - Rethinking Coercion

Summary

With the framework of TCL and the formal analysis of • types in place, I turn now to coercion. The classic cases of coercion involve some sort of “shift” in a predication from the predication of a property to an object to the predication of a property to an eventuality of some kind. Here is a motivating example.

(8.1) Sheila enjoyed her new book.

(8.1) has the preferred reading that Sheila enjoyed reading the book. In this chapter I will present a formal analysis of such shifts. I will also provide an account of how such shifts are sensitive to the discourse context. For example, if the discourse context makes contextually salient that Sheila is an author, then the possible reading of (8.1) is that Sheila enjoyed writing the book. If the discourse context makes contextually salient that Sheila is the name of a cat, then the event enjoyed is perhaps something like clawing, scratching, biting, or sleeping on the book. GL, which attempted to predict the different readings for the predication with the coercion from the qualia associated with the direct object of the verb, was unable to model these context dependent inferences.

Re-examining the data

Coercions involving a shift from a predication involving an argument that is not an eventuality to a predication involving an argument of eventuality type are widespread. Adjectives and other verbs that take syntactically given arguments of type e but that presuppose arguments of eventuality type sometimes force a predication over an eventuality that is related in some way to the denotation of the syntactically given argument.