Bibliographic record
Abstract
Complement coercion (The woman finished the coffee, The worker started a bench) has been treated as a phenomenon of mismatch and repair, where an aspectual verb (begin, finish, start, etc.) which typically takes an event argument (e.g., fight, game) instead occurs with a physical entity as its direct object (e.g. coffee, bench) (Pustejovsky and Bouillon, 1995). The specific combination of an aspectual verb and an entity type direct object is known to cause processing costs for readers(McElree et al., 2001; Traxler et al., 2002, and more). With few exceptions in past literature (e.g., Pi˜nango and Deo, 2016), the processing of these coercion sentences has been analogized to the interpretation of a covert complement verb, semantically composed but not syntactically present (finish the coffee→finish [drinking] the coffee). This means that past accounts treat coercion interpretation as lexicalized event retrieval – a process of interpreting a physical entity direct object as an event by way of lexical selection (i.e., choosing an appropriate verb to represent the event). In this dissertation, I present 3 diverse methodologies to offer a new descriptive account of complement coercion. I argue for coercion interpretation as lexically underspecified event selection, where an event sense is chosen from several broad possible meanings of the aspectual verb itself. I argue against the dominant treatment of coercion as lexicalized event retrieval, and in favour of a descriptive theory that relies on independently motivated ground principles. More broadly, I situate the processing of complement coercion as a derivative of other linguistic phenomena, as opposed to being a construction-specific process of repair. I end by noting other coercion phenomena where a similar, multidisciplinary approach might challenge prevailing assumptions that require singular construction-specific explanations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".