Event Selection and Coercion of Two Verbs of Ingestion: a Marvs Perspective

Event semantics in general and event type coercion in particular have been a challenging yet rewarding topic in verbal semantics (Pustejovsky, 1995). However, there have been few corpus-based empirical accounts discussing the range of event type coercions based on the lexical meanings of the verbs. In this paper, we explore the possible types of event coercions for two verbs of ingestion in Mandarin Chinese. In particular, we will show that different types of coercions can be predicted by the bifurcation of event-internal and role-internal attributes proposed in the MARVS theory (Huang et al, 2000). Data examined are taken from the Chinese Gigaword Corpus (LDC 2005) and accessed through Chinese Word Sketch (Huang et al, 2005).

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IJCPOL
• Authors: Jia-Fei Hong, Chu-Ren Huang, Kathleen Ahrens
• Keywords: Event Type, Event Type Coercion, Huang Et Al, IJCPOL 2008