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Cooperation and coercion

  • Jenny Audring EMAIL logo and Geert Booij
Published/Copyright: June 21, 2016

Abstract

Coercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literature, we identify three mechanisms – selection, enrichment, and override – that have alternatively been proposed to account for coercion effects. We then present an approach that combines all three mechanisms, arguing that they can be unified along a single axis: the degree of top-down influence of complex structures on lexical semantics.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ray Jackendoff and two anonymous reviewers for comments and advice. Jenny Audring is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for a Veni grant, #275-70-036.

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Published Online: 2016-6-21
Published in Print: 2016-7-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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