Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study
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Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self‑paced Reading Study Wenting Xue1 · Meichun Liu1 Accepted: 31 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with complement coercion. Complement coercion is a known linguistic phenomenon in which some verbs, semantically requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entitydenoting complement, as in Mary began the book. The combination (i.e., event-selecting verb + entity-denoting noun) has been reported to involve type mismatch, and thus elicits processing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages, such as English and German, it is debatable if the phenomenon exists in a typologically distinct language from English (e.g., in structural complexity of words), such as Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, the study conducted a self-paced reading experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion. Keywords Mandarin Chinese · Complement coercion · Type mismatch · Semantic enrichment · Self-paced reading
Introduction Complement coercion is an intriguing syntax-semantic interface phenomenon in sentence comprehension (e.g., Utt et al. 2013; Zarcone et al. 2017), which involves repairing a semantic type mismatch between an event-selecting verb (i.e., EventV) and an entitydenoting complement noun phrase (i.e., EntityNP) (Jackendoff 1997; Pustejovsky 1991, 1995). This phenomenon is found in sentences such as (1) below. The verb begin appears to be an event-selecting verb, which normally takes an eventive complement (Levin 1993), as began reading/to read the novel in (1a). But this verb can also co-occur with a nominal complement denoting an entity/object, as began the novel in (1b). What is noticeable in * Wenting Xue [email protected] 1
Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Q78, B7704, Blue Zone, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, 83, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
(1b) is that there appears to be a type mismatch between the verb and its nominal complement, without overtly indicating the involved activity. To remedy the mismatch and satisfy the semantic selection of the verb, the noun complement is supposed to undergo a type shift from an entity to an event, which, according to Jackendoff (1997), triggers semantic enrichment. 1. (a) Mary began reading/to read the novel. (b) Mary began the novel. The enriched composition contains certain event information associated with the complement, which is expressed neither by the individual lexical items nor by the syntactic structure of the coercion sentence. Accordi
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