Creative Discourse Workshop

Verbal Meaning and the Role of Coercion in Linguistic Creativity
Alexandra Spalek (University of Oslo)

Language is inherently creative, often in ways that go unnoticed. One prominent aspect of this creativity is lexical creativity, exemplified by figurative polysemy, where a word's original meaning extends into new domains, revealing a fundamental feature of natural language. However, formal semantics, with its idealized perspective on composition and the lexicon, tends to overlook the creativity that emerges from the flexibility of lexical meanings in context. In this talk, I will specifically examine the flexibility of verb semantics and explore the necessity and implications of coercion within this framework. Drawing on insights from various languages, I will highlight the limitations of coercion when understood as a universal creative mechanism.

Mechanisms of Complement Coercion – theoretical and empirical considerations
B01 talk: Panagiota Rassia & Natalja Peiseler

In this talk we will discuss the phenomenon of complement coercion – the interpretation of constructions like “Lisa began the book” as ‘Lisa began doing something with the book’. We will consider competing accounts from the literature concerning the mechanisms and processing steps involved in the comprehension of this interesting phenomenon at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and critically reflect on the predictions they make concerning observable processing costs and effects. We will present our own ideas and observations with regard to the presumed interpretive mechanisms as well as their application limits, and the necessary prerequisites and architecture of the mental faculties underlying sentence comprehension. Further, we will present first results from our project's ongoing experimental work on the online processing of coerced expressions. In particular, we will discuss some methodological shortcomings of previous relevant research and how we aim to overcome these in our replication study. Next to this, we will discuss preliminary results from a corpus analysis we conducted on German data demonstrating the distinct behaviour of two of the aspectual verbs we consider in our studies, namely beginnen and beenden. The latter study is part of a cross-linguistic study we are conducting in collaboration with Maria Piñango (Yale University), where we investigate the generalisability of the phenomenon and its implications across languages. We will conclude the talk with an outlook on future research regarding the influence of discourse effects on the interpretation of coerced expressions.

Indirect requests at the syntax-pragmatics interface: A cross-linguistic perspective
B03 talk by Julia Demina

This talk examines indirect requests through the syntax-pragmatics interface, addressing the theoretical puzzle of how a single linguistic form can simultaneously encode two illocutionary forces. I propose that indirect requests arise through a modulation mechanism operating at the interface level, where compositionally encoded syntactic features systematically interact to modify basic clause type specifications and yield indirect interpretations. Rather than treating indirectness as either fully syntactic or purely pragmatic, this approach locates the derivation of indirect illocutionary force at the interface, where morphosyntactic properties constrain but do not fully determine pragmatic outcomes. Drawing on evidence from Russian, Turkish, and Chinese, I demonstrate that despite typological differences in how these languages morphosyntactically realize modal, interrogative, conditional, and politeness features, they exhibit striking uniformity in which feature combinations yield indirect request interpretations. This cross-linguistic convergence suggests that the modulation mechanism operates as a universal interface process, with parametric variation limited to the surface realization of underlying features.

Non-canonical questions in Hungarian: Form types evoking a QUD
Beáta Gyuris, Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics

Abstract PDF

Reacting to questions with false presuppositions
B03 talk by René Nicolas

It is a well-known fact that, when responding to a statement, it is more difficult to target the non-at-issue material (such as presuppositions) than the at-issue material. At the same time, not reacting to a presupposition at all can lead to (or at least signal) accommodation of the presupposed proposition. Presuppositions within a question (like those of provocative journalists) pose a complex problem for the person asked: On the one hand they are expected to answer the question, on the other hand, they may want to raise objections to the presupposed content, especially when this content is wrong, from their point of view. This talk explores how politicians might react in such situations, and how this can be described within models of discourse.

A Systematic Look at Special Questions
Hans-Martin Gärtner, Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics

We investigate the relation between illocution types and sentence types, focusing on principled characterizations of question acts. Particular attention will be paid to predicted but apparently non-attested cases

Non-culminating accomplishments in English and German: A cross-linguistic reading time study
B01 talk by Oliver Bott, Jens Michaelis and Torgrim Solstad

We present the results of a crosslinguistic study on the interpretation and processing of aspectual coercion in the case of non-culminating accomplishments in English and German, a topic recently discussed both in semantics and pragmatics as well as in psycholinguistics. The semantic properties of the constructions were investigated in a rating task. In particular, two offline experiments employing a telicity inference rating task showed that non-culminating accomplishments in both languages actually involve a shift in interpretation. To study the processing consequences of these shifts in meaning, a total of five online processing experiments were conducted. Four self-paced reading experiments show that this type of coercion isn't costly - neither in German, a language lacking grammatical aspect, nor in English with an aspectual opposition between progressive and perfective forms. This lack of effect in processing coercion was obtained in a first pair of experiments using adverbial modification (sentence-internally) within the verb phrase and in a second pair of experiments in which aspectual coercion was triggered in a subsequent discourse unit. A final stops-making-sense experiment replicates the lack of effect for English and furthermore shows that the processing of non-culminating accomplishments does not incur a processing effect even in a task calling for immediate full interpretation. Taken together, the findings of our study provide evidence for smooth transitions in aspectual interpretation as afforded by the sentence but also the larger discourse context.

Coercion and compositionality: a semantic-minimalist account
Roberto G. de Almeida, Concordia University

In linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience, it is almost a consensus that understanding a putatively indeterminate sentence such as “Mary began a book” entails a process by which the nominal complement is “coerced” into an activity or that there is some form of interpolation in semantic composition, thus licensing an interpretation such as “Mary began reading a book”. Numerous linguistic and experimental studies have suggested that this process relies, to a large extent, on the information contained in the lexical representation of “book,” which provides the filler event to yield an enriched semantic composition. In this talk, I will argue against this view and for a simple, minimalist account of compositionality. The reasons are numerous, some are classic: any account of compositionality that rests on lexical-semantic features, hidden (and non-structurally-motivated) predicates, or nominal interpolation stands on a yet to be provided analytic/synthetic distinction. I will show, moreover, that psycholinguistic evidence for coercion is slim at best; that coercion effects stemming from psycholinguistic studies (e.g., longer reading times for “coerced” constructions) do not constitute evidence for semantic interpolation nor type-shifting; and that linguistic analysis of indeterminate sentences can account for much of the coercion effects in terms of structurally-determined positions which might serve as triggers for pragmatic enrichment.  I will discuss psycholinguistic and fMRI experiments suggesting that attempts to resolve indeterminacy rely on pragmatic rather than on lexical-semantic decompositional processes.

Biased polar questions: A cross-linguistic study
B03 talk by Maryam Mohammadi, René Nicolas, Arndt Riester & Nori Hayashi

A central motivation for the use of polar questions are contexts in which there is a mismatch between a speaker’s background information (the original bias) and inferences drawn from evidence observed or verbally obtained within the current context (the contextual bias). Speakers adapt the form of their polar questions depending on a number of variables. Among these we find the strength of the gathered contextual evidence to be prominent. We present some descriptive data concerning the realisation of polar questions within different contexts in three languages: Farsi, German and Japanese.