Coercion and leaking argument structures in Construction Grammar

Abstract

This article investigates the role of coercion and contextual background information in influencing acceptability judgments. Focusing on data from English resultative constructions I propose a usage-based constructional approach that accounts for the factors that allow for a verb's conventionalized argument structure specifications to leak, thereby allowing otherwise unacceptable nonconventionalized utterances such as ??Ed hammered the metal safe to be judged acceptable by means of coercion. By putting less emphasis on independently existing meaningful constructions I argue that frame-semantic information at the level of lexical units (mini-constructions) can be used effectively to link semantic information to syntactic information to arrive at both lower-level and higher-level constructional descriptions for both decoding and encoding purposes.

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