Motion verbs
This project was concerned with German verbs expression motion, such as the following:
- Der Kopilot fuhr zum Rollfeld, und zwar in zehn Minuten. (The co-pilot drove to the runway, namely in ten minutes.)
- Der Kopilot fuhr zum Rollfeld, und zwar zehn Minuten lang. (The co-pilot drove to the runway, namely for ten minutes.)
- Der Kopilot fuhr über das Rollfeld, und zwar in zehn Minuten. (The co-pilot drove over the runway, namely in ten minutes.)
- Der Kopilot fuhr über das Rollfeld, und zwar zehn Minuten lang. (The co-pilot drove over the runway, namely for ten minutes.)
Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. In the theoretical literature the choice between the two as a modeling device often appears to be rather arbitrary. Experimental studies suggest that coercion but not underspecification causes additional processing costs. This paper presents experimental evidence intended to help settling the dispute between underspecification- and coercion-based approaches. The aspectual composition of motion verbs with directional phrases and temporal adverbials is taken as a test case for a comparison of the two approaches. The results of a reading-time and an acceptability judgment study indicate that motion verbs are underspecified w.r.t. aspectuality and combine with telic and atelic directional phrases with equal ease. The combination with a mismatching temporal adverbial is an instance of coercion and causes additional processing costs. Two control studies suggest that a motion verb’s telicity bias, determined by the frequency of occurrence, does not affect the aspectual computation of larger linguistic units.