Aspectual Coercion and Lexical Semantics Part 1: Using Selection to Describe the Interaction between Construction and Verb Meaning

Coercion is an inferential strategy used to resolve conflict between an operator and its argument. Such conflicts are resolved in favor of the semantic requirements of the operator (Talmy, 2000). Jackendoff (1997) and De Swart (1998), among others, represent coercion through type-shifting operators that intervene between an aspectual operator and its situation-type argument, ensuring that the argument is of the appropriate type for the operator. This framework has a mapping problem: the rules that it uses to represent aspectual-type shifts simply replace one aspectual type (the input) with another (the output), so it does not explain how the input representation constrains the output representation. This article offers a solution to the mapping problem: treating aspectual type shifts as operations on the decomposed semantic representations of verbs. I will show that two such operations can capture both implicit and explicit aspectual type-shifts in English, involving both tense constructions and aspectual constructions.