I'm done my homework: Complement Coercion and Aspectual Adjectives in Canadian English

Patrick M. Murphy
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Abstract

Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like ‘begin’ and ‘finish’) with entity nouns (like ‘the book’ or ‘the coffee’) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al. 2001; Traxler et al. 2002; Pickering et al. 2005). This processing cost is widely interpreted as evidence of complement coercion—aspectual verbs semantically select for an event (like ‘dancing’ or ‘the dance’) and can take entity objects only if they are coerced into an event through a computationally costly process of type-shifting (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This paper presents an eye-tracking study of the Canadian English ‘be done NP’ construction, e.g., ‘I am done/finished my homework’ (not to be confused with the dialect-neutral ‘I am done/finished WITH my homework’) to mean ‘I have finished my homework’. Results suggest a processing penalty for entity-denoting nouns like ‘the script’ (compared to event description nouns like ‘the audition’) in this construction, which supports Fruehwald & Myler’s (2015) proposal that ‘done’ and ‘finished’ in this construction are aspectual adjectives that behave like aspectual verbs in requiring complement coercion and type-shifting for entity-denoting nouns.
我已经完成了我的功课:加拿大英语中的补语、强迫和形容词
自定节奏阅读和眼球追踪研究普遍发现,将体动词(如“开始”和“完成”)与实体名词(如“书”或“咖啡”)结合起来,会增加对名词及其周围的阅读时间(McElree et al. 2001;Traxler et al. 2002;Pickering et al. 2005)。这种处理成本被广泛地解释为补语强制方面动词在语义上选择一个事件(如“跳舞”或“跳舞”)的证据,并且只有当实体对象通过计算上昂贵的类型转换过程被强制进入一个事件时,它们才能接受实体对象(Pustejovsky 1995;Jackendoff 1997)。本文对加拿大英语“be done NP”结构进行了眼动追踪研究,例如,“I am done/finished my homework”(不要与方言中性的“I am done/finished with my homework”混淆)表示“我已经完成了我的作业”。结果表明,在这种结构中,“脚本”等实体表示名词(与“试听”等事件描述名词相比)的处理会受到惩罚,这支持了Fruehwald和Myler(2015)的建议,即“done”和“finished”在这种结构中是方面的形容词,其行为类似于方面动词,需要补语强制和实体表示名词的类型转换。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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