Cooperation and coercion

Abstract

AbstractCoercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literature, we identify three mechanisms – selection, enrichment, and override – that have alternatively been proposed to account for coercion effects. We then present an approach that combines all three mechanisms, arguing that they can be unified along a single axis: the degree of top-down influence of complex structures on lexical semantics.