linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, coercion is a term applied to a process of reinterpretation triggered by a mismatch between the

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

properties of a

selector Selector may refer to: *Selector, electrical or mechanical component, a switch *''Selector'', music scheduling software for radio stations created by Radio Computing Services *Selector, of music, otherwise known as a disc jockey *Selector, a pers ...

and the

properties of the selected element. As Catalina Ramírez explains it, this phenomenon is called ''coercion'' because the process forces meaning into a lexical phrase where there is otherwise a discrepancy of the semantic aspects of the phrase. The term was first used in the semantic literature in 1988 by Marc Moens and

Mark Steedman Mark Jerome Steedman, (born 18 September 1946) is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Biography Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex in 1968, with a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology, and from the University of Edinburg ...

, who adopted it due to its "loose analogy with type-coercion in programming languages.” In his written framework of the

generative lexicon Generative lexicon (GL) is a theory of linguistic semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language. The first major work outlining the framework is James Pustejovsky's 1991 article "The Generative Lexicon". S ...

(a formal compositional approach to lexical semantics), Pustejovsky (1995:111) defines coercion as "a semantic operation that converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function, where it would otherwise result in a type error." Coercion in the Pustejovsky framework refers to both ''complement coercion'' and ''aspectual coercion''. ''Complement coercion'' involves a mismatch of semantic meaning between lexical items, while ''aspectual coercion'' involves a mismatch of temporality between lexical items. A commonly used example of complement coercion is the sentence "I began the book.” The phrase "I began" is assumed to be a selector which requires the following complement to denote an event, but "the book" denotes a noun phrase, not an event. So, as a result of coercion, "I began" forces “the book" from a simple noun phrase to an event involving that noun, causing the sentence to be interpreted to mean (most likely) "I began to read the book" or "I began to write the book." An example of aspectual coercion involving temporal connectives is "Let's leave after dessert" (Pustejovsky 1995:230). Another example of aspectual coercion from

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

research is the sentence "The tiger jumped for an hour," where the prepositional phrase "for an hour" coerces the lexical meaning of "jumped" to be iterative across the entire duration, instead of having occurred only once. Coercion is a well-discussed topic in the field of linguistics, especially in semantics and

construction grammar Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...

. It is also explored in

cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...

. An example is Yao-Ying Lai’s 2017 study on the effects of coercion on mental processing; results showed that phrases involving aspectual words (such as “start”) required longer reading times to understand than did phrases with psychological words (such as “enjoy” and “love”).Lai, Y. (2017). The complement coercion phenomenon: Implications for models of sentence processing (Doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 2017) (pp. 1-275). Yale University. Currently, there is debate surrounding the proper approach to coercion in linguistics, including systemic coercion versus language-user coercion and a semantic perspective versus

pragmatic Pragmatism is a philosophical movement. Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to: *Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy *Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics *''Pragmatics'', an academic journal in ...

perspective, among others.

References

Cognitive linguistics Semantics Pragmatics Formal semantics (natural language) {{Ling-stub