Flexible meaning adjustments in context: underspecification vs. reinterpretation

Missive nouns, polysemy and coercion
Peter Sutton (University of Potsdam)

Noun-related complementiser clauses (nccs) which are formed with that in English have a limited distribution. They are found with a wide variety of informational nouns such as those in (1a). However, there is a class of informational nouns that have been observed not to license nccs, namely informational–physical entity ‘dot object’ nouns such as those in (1b) (see e.g., Elliott, 2020). Moreover, nccs cannot be used with nouns that straightforwardly denote physical objects (1c) or events (1d).

(1)
a. the allegation/belief/evidence/fact/information/report/statement that Bilbo found the ring
b. #the book/brochure/newsletter/newspaper that Bilbo found the ring
c. #the house that Bilbo met Gandalf
d. #the event/celebration that Gandalf set off fireworks

This talk presents data, derived from corpus studies on English and Finnish, that are surprising, given the distribution of nccs with nouns such as book and newspaper in (1b). We show that a subset of informational–physical entity ‘dot object’ nouns in fact do license nccs, a class I label missive nouns.

For instance, in (2) and (3) letter and artikkeli (‘article’, Finnish) occur with nccs.
(2) Well that old lady got a letter that she had to bring all her valuables and she was sent accordingly to an old people’s home. (UkWaC)
(3) Luin

read.1.pst
artikkelin,
article.acc
ett¨a
comp
viel¨a
still
t¨an¨a
this.ess
vuonna
year.ess
tullaan
come.pass
myym¨a¨an
sell.inf.ill
enemm¨an
more
dvd-soittimia,
DVD-player.pl.par
kuin
than
blu-ray
Blu-ray
soittimia.
player.pl.par
“I read an article that, this year, there will still be more DVD players than Blu-ray players sold.”

(FiTenTen24)

These and similar data are challenging for analyses of nccs. On ratzer’s approach, nccs select for nouns that denote ‘contentful entities’ Bondarenko, 2022; Elliott, 2020; Kratzer, 2006; Moulton, 2015,
2009). However, the notion of contentful entities becomes ad hoc if, for instance, newspapers are not contentful entities, but newspaper articles are. An alternative to the Kratzerian analysis is to restrict the distribution of nccs in terms of the polysemy class of the head noun (Sutton, 2026, manuscript). However, this also cannot straightforwardly account for the data in (2) and (3). The goal of this talk is to present and assess both the alternative semantic and pragmatic solutions to this puzzle. Using a combination of corpus data and native speaker judgements for English and Finnish, I show that argue that, based on the restricted distribution of missive nouns with nccs, that the solution must be at least in part pragmatic, of which one possible analysis is based upon coercion.

How rare is complement coercion? Converging evidence from corpora, language models, and the language of science
Giosuè Baggio (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

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.

Against inchoative/inceptive states
Berit Gerke (Humboldt University of Berlin)