Beers, Kaffi, and Schnaps: Different Grammatical Options for Restaurant Talk Coercions in Three Germanic Languages

Abstract

This paper discusses constructions such as We'll have two beers and a coffee that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behavior of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved. We show that even within such a restricted linguistic sample in closely related languages one finds three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual transition. Our findings suggest an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic phenomenon, located on a level of semantic representations that serves as an interface between the conceptual and the grammatical systems and takes into account inter- and intralinguistic variations.Work on this paper was supported by NSF award BCS-0080377 to Boston University. The material is based in part on work done while the second author was serving as Director of the Linguistics Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation. For comments on an earlier version, we would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers.

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