Coertion in phase periphrasis: From cognition to computation

Abstract

This article presents an investigation in the field of verbal semantics, focusing on how phase periphrases affect the aspectual class of a lexical verb, that is, on the phenomenon of coercion. Our approach is based on Croft’s proposal for the analysis of lexical aspectual classes. This model has been extended by two new categories: locus and energy. Our theoretical starting point is Cognitive Linguistics, thus, based on cognitive representation and in order to demonstrate the viability of our proposal, the different coercion processes detected in our analysis have been computationally implemented. For this purpose, we have developed a set of heuristic rules, which allow us to represent the changes that the periphrasis exerts on the lexical verb (coercion). Finally, applying these rules also allows us to obtain automatically the interpretation of the clause.