A Study of Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from an Acceptability Judgment Task

Wenting Xue (Corresponding Author), Meichun Liu, Stephen Politzer-Ahles

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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., ‘finished (writing/reading) the article’), and non-coercion counterparts (e.g., ‘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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationChinese Lexical Semantics
Subtitle of host publication21st Workshop, CLSW 2020, Hong Kong, China, May 28–30, 2020, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsMeichun Liu, Chunyu Kit, Qi Su
PublisherSpringer Cham
Pages775-784
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9783030811976
ISBN (Print)9783030811969
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Jul 2021
Event21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 28 May 202030 May 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12278 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period28/05/2030/05/20

Keywords

  • Acceptability ratings
  • Complement coercion
  • Mandarin Chinese

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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