Constructional Coercion Between Constructional And Lexical Meanings Examined From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

As the title suggests, this dissertation is intended to study coercion from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Coercion and constructions are closely related to each other, which has been accepted by almost all linguists. In a broad sense, coercion is prevalent in human language, it structures the basic sentences. Chapter three is mainly about the universality of coercion among different constructions and the detailed process of coercion. After surveying some representative definitions, we have formulated our own working definition which in our opinion is more elaborated. Metonymy, which plays an irreplaceable part in the mechanism of coercion, has been attached great importance. Without doubt, the operational mechanisms should include other aspects, such as rhetorical, semantic and syntactic. We will survey the previous accounts of coercion in chapter two.Recent work in cognitive linguistics has hired the term coercion which was formerly associated with computational linguistics to apply to a number of instances in the study of natural language in which there is an incongruity between the semantics of a syntactic frame and the semantics of lexical items found in it. Some of these instances illustrate areas which could well be described as extensions of boundaries in which the harmony between lexical and constructional aspect has been penetrated; others illustrate mismatch between them.In recent Construction Grammar studies, the notion of coercion has been employed to describe the successive process of reconciling the meaning of a morph syntactic construction with the meaning of lexical filler. It has been shown that a new grammatical function does not arise homogenously in all uses of the lexical item concerned, but its origin is bound to specific linguistic lexical meaning or constructional meaning. However, the notions of coercion as well as construction differ greatly among scholars, and research into the impact of constructions in Construction Grammar scenarios has only begun.This dissertation advances in this direction as it links the notion of coercion of constructional meaning with central concepts of Construction Grammar. Data from coercion phenomena of English, which are typically found in coercion processes, are analyzed as specific types of constructions in Construction Grammar. Take My sister walks to work as an example. It is the product of coercion. Coercion can be illustrated in its application to the grammar of English expressions.Construction Grammar assumes that the constructions of a language are not just a collection of unrelated items but are hierarchically ordered, so that similar or common features among constructions can be motivated by their relationship to other constructions. These relations are described via the notions of unification, inheritance, and coercion. In order to solve the problem of polysemy of constructions, this dissertation postulates inheritance relations whereby both formal and semantic features may be transmitted from one construction to another,and thus similarity relations as well as polysemy may be accounted for. As Goldberg (1995: 70) points out: "A given construction is motivated to the degree that its structure is inherited from other constructions in language".A further concept that adds to the flexibility of the descriptive tools is the notion of coercion. In this dissertation we use the term coercion to account for the possibility to unify constructions, which due to mutually exclusive semantic restrictions, should not allow unification in the first place. The author argues that constructional meaning under certain conditions induces a shift in the designations of content words used in the construction. This means that conflicts of compatibility are solved by the reinterpretation of certain lexical items in terms of their fit for the constructional meaning. This mechanism does not merely serve to resolve semantic conflicts or conflicts between constructional meaning and lexical meaning. Instead, it is employed to interpret regular as well as irregular combinations of constructions with lexical items, and thus allows a powerful generalization.In addition, coercion, understood as the reinterpretation of lexemes in previously incompatible constructions, is based on cognitive and pragmatic procedures like metaphorical or metonymic extension. Though Michaelis does not explicitly mention this connection, it becomes quite evident in quotes like the following, which defines coercion as a pragmatically motivated interpretation: "Coercion effects are triggered when the interpreter must reconcile the meaning of a morphosyntactic construction with the meaning of a lexical filler" (Michaelis 2004: 7).These cognitive and pragmatic procedures constitute the basis of the general and ubiquitous linguistic creativity of language users (who are always speakers and hearers at the same time), which has long been known to be one of the driving forces of linguistic change. Thus, to give just one straightforward example, the metaphorical extension of a word, which first becomes visible in a coerced construction, may become generalized and independent of that construction (via the creativity of the speaker/hearer), which results in semantic change of that linguistic item.The concept of coercion, as we have analyzed thoroughly here, does not refer to a newly discovered cognitive or pragmatic procedure; instead, it seems to be a useful notion to refer in a summarizing way to the linguistic results of the cognitive and pragmatic procedures speakers and hearers resort to in using their language. It is this area in particular where important synergetic effects between constructional concepts and principles of language change and grammaticalization are to be expected.