TY - CHAP
T1 - A Study of Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese
T2 - 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020
AU - Xue, Wenting
AU - Liu, Meichun
AU - Politzer-Ahles, Stephen
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This study explores whether or not Mandarin sentences with complement coercion are acceptable to native speakers. Complement coercion is a phenomenon in which some event-selecting verbs (e.g., begin), which semantically select an event-denoting complement, can occur with an entity-denoting complement (e.g., Mary began the book). While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in English, it is debatable whether complement coercion sentences are also available in Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, Mandarin speakers were invited to rate the acceptability of coercion sentences composed of aspectual verbs with entity-denoting complements (e.g., 完成这篇文章 ‘finished (writing/reading) the article’), and non-coercion counterparts (e.g., 翻译这篇文章 ‘translate the article’). Results show that the coercion sentences are generally acceptable to native speakers of Mandarin. The results support previous findings in relevant studies on Mandarin, and further provide cross-linguistic evidence for this universal phenomenon.
AB - This study explores whether or not Mandarin sentences with complement coercion are acceptable to native speakers. Complement coercion is a phenomenon in which some event-selecting verbs (e.g., begin), which semantically select an event-denoting complement, can occur with an entity-denoting complement (e.g., Mary began the book). While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in English, it is debatable whether complement coercion sentences are also available in Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, Mandarin speakers were invited to rate the acceptability of coercion sentences composed of aspectual verbs with entity-denoting complements (e.g., 完成这篇文章 ‘finished (writing/reading) the article’), and non-coercion counterparts (e.g., 翻译这篇文章 ‘translate the article’). Results show that the coercion sentences are generally acceptable to native speakers of Mandarin. The results support previous findings in relevant studies on Mandarin, and further provide cross-linguistic evidence for this universal phenomenon.
KW - Complement coercion
KW - Mandarin Chinese
KW - Acceptability ratings
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138994139&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85138994139&origin=recordpage
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_64
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_64
M3 - RGC 12 - Chapter in an edited book (Author)
SN - 978-3-030-81196-9
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 775
EP - 784
BT - Chinese Lexical Semantics
A2 - Liu, Meichun
A2 - Kit, Chunyu
A2 - Su, Qi
PB - Springer
CY - Cham
Y2 - 28 May 2020 through 30 May 2020
ER -