A Comparative Study of Event Coercion between Chinese and English

作者：Song Zuoyan^*

来源：Language and Linguistics, 2014, 15(2): 199-229.

DOI：10.1177/1606822X13506157

• Generative Lexicon Theory
• logical metonymy
• event coercion
• complement coercion
• type mismatch

This paper aims to explore the difference between Mandarin Chinese and English in event coercion, especially complement coercion, and tries to offer an account for it. The data show that while event coercion is a universal linguistic mechanism and is pervasive in both languages, it is more pervasive in English. In other words, while in English some event information is left unexpressed in surface form, in Chinese it tends to be expressed directly on the syntactic level. Rather than attributing this difference to the different lexicalization of nouns in these two languages, this paper argues that it is due to the trigger of coercion. That is, nominals in Chinese do not show the lack of intra-nominal event information, but eventive verbs, adjectives and temporal connectives in Chinese have no or weaker coercion potentials than their English equivalents. This is correlated with typological traits.

• 出版日期2014-1
• 单位北京师范大学