Exploring Chinese type coercion: A web-as-corpus study
The 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon 2009
This study aims to explore Chinese type coercion, a phenomenon which has been refuted by some linguists. Their discussion has been based on the translation of the English sentences discussed in the coercion literature. We point out the inappropriateness of this approach by showing that it does not take account of the lexical semantics of the target language and the real language use. To show that type coercion is pervasive in Chinese, we adopt the corpus-based approach (web as corpus) and focus on one of the generative mechanisms proposed in Pustjovsky (1995), namely, true complement coercion. A handcrafted lexico-syntactic template is used to extract coercion data along with their noncoercive counterparts from the Web. Our preliminary results support the hypothesis that true complement coercion is a universal linguistic mechanism. Our data-extraction algorithm is also likely to be useful in automatically extracting coercion data from corpora for future theoretical and computational studies.