The Generative Lexicon

This file formalizes the type coercion of the seventh chapter of Pustejovsky 1995. Type coercion (16) converts an argument to the type a function expects where application would otherwise fail, and function application with coercion (17) applies a function either directly, when the argument has the selected type, or through one of the shifting operators available to the argument, and otherwise produces a type error (Shifter, Applies). The available operators are of two kinds. Subtype coercion (23) follows the inferences of a single type lattice, the one of Figure 6.1 extended by the chains of §7.1.2, so that drive accepts a Honda through Honda ≤ car ≤ vehicle (SemType, subtype_readings, subtype_within_lattice). True complement coercion (§7.1.3) instead reaches through the qualia: begin selects an event, a book is a dot object of information and physical object whose telic and agentive qualia name reading and writing events (29), and the two event readings of John began a book (27) are exactly the two qualia projections (begin_book_readings), each leaving the type lattice (book_qualia_leave_lattice). The coerced complement embeds the noun phrase in the event expression (31), and on a model where a reading of the book is not a writing of it the two readings differ (telic_ne_agentive). Where the noun has no event-typed alias, Mary began the rock of the fourth chapter, coercion fails (begin_rock_no_reading).

Implementation notes

Types are the sorts of the paper's examples with an explicit ancestor list each, the dot object book inheriting from both information and physical object; a quale enters coercion by the type it projects, its relational content only in the model of (31), and the formal and constitutive qualia project no alias. The want and believe paradigms of §7.1 and the aspectual coercion of the ninth chapter are not formalized.

References

• Pustejovsky 1995, The Generative Lexicon