Valency coercion in Italian
An exploratory study [*] *
The paper investigates valency coercion effects in Italian by means of an acceptability rating task on nine
argument structure constructions. The experimental design follows Perek & Hilpert
(2014) in presenting three conditions: grammatical, impossible and coercion stimuli. This design allows us to test
several factors: the acceptability of creative coerced structures, the role of age and – most importantly – the influence of the
construction itself. Results overall confirm our hypotheses: valency coercion is identified as an intermediate level between
grammaticality and ungrammaticality, with varying degrees of “coercibility” across constructions. An influence of age is not in
evidence for coercion sentences, suggesting that the systematic variation in acceptability is due to the influence of different
constructions. We propose that coercion resolution results from the interaction of constructional and lexical semantics.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Models of argument structure realization
- 1.2Coercion phenomena
- 1.3Coercion effects in Italian
- 2.An acceptability rating task on Italian valency coercion
- 2.1Materials
- 2.2Stimuli selection
- 2.3Subjects
- 2.4Procedure
- 3.Analyses and results
- 3.1First model
- 3.2Cxn type variation
- 3.3Variation between age groups
- 4.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
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Zúñiga, F., & Kittilä, S.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Busso, Lucia
Busso, Lucia, Florent Perek & Alessandro Lenci
2021.
Constructional associations trump lexical associations in processing valency coercion.
Cognitive Linguistics 32:2
► pp. 287 ff.

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