Causality and aspect in ability, actuality, and implicativity

Past-tense ability ascriptions (e.g., "was able") alternate between pure, potentially unrealized ability and an interpretation which actualizes the ability. The alternation extends to abilitative uses of possibility modals, with actualized readings strengthening to actuality entailments under perfective aspect in aspect-marking languages (Bhatt 1999). These interpretations resist explanation on accounts which seek to derive them in the composition of modality and aspect. I build on causal analyses of implicative inferences (from lexical implicatives like "manage" as well as 'variably-implicative' "enough" comparatives; Baglini & Francez 2016, Nadathur 2016, 2017) to propose a new approach to actuality inferences, grounded in a causal semantics for ability predicates. This account derives both pure ability and actuality readings, and explains parallels between implicative "manage" and actualized ability on the basis of shared (presuppositional) causal structure. "Manage" and ability differ in asserted content, but the difference is neutralized – producing actuality entailments – under a perfective operator which selects for eventive predicates, and combines with stative ability attributions only via aspectual coercion.

Coercion for the ages? A thousand years of parallel inchoative histories for the French passé simple and passé composé

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of so-called aspectual coercion (de Swart 1998, Bary & Egg 2012) in French, with respect to two major tenses, namely the simple past (passé simple) (PS) and compound past (passé composé) (PC); it will more specifically bear on cases of inchoative readings. Throughout a study spanning several diachronic stages and capitalizing on earlier work (Caudal 2015a, Caudal 2015b, Caudal, Burnertt & Troberg 2016), it will be shown that the PC and the PS exhibit striking differences in their acquisition of inchoative coercions, with the PC consistently lagging behind the PS in some respects. Initially, at the Old French period, the PC was totally deprived of any coercive power w.r.t. states, whereas the PS already had a broader and better established inchoative coercive capability. But across subsequent stages of the language, the PS gradually increased its inchoative potential at a steady pace – although it seems to retain some difficulties with certain types of stative utterances, especially those denoting individual-level states, and locative/posture structures. While the PC has often been claimed to have largely replaced the PS, I will here show that even in Modern French, the PC seems to still have a noticeably lesser ‘inchoativizing power’ than the PS. In order words, in spite of nearly a thousand years of parallel evolution and semantic convergence, the initial semantic gap between the two forms still hasn’t been bridged. I will suggest that these consistent differences should lead us to consider so-called inchoative coercion as a distinctly conventionalized type of meaning expansion mechanism – rather than a simple matter of overcoming the violation of some aspectual semantic restriction.

The semantics of the simple tenses and full-verb inversion in English

This paper offers a fresh perspective on (restrictions on) aspectual coercion, thereby focusing on the essentially epistemic import of aspectual constructions. The case study that I will discuss is the unexpected use of the simple tenses for ongoing event reports in sentences involving full-verb inversion. I will argue that this attestation of the simple present/past in inverted sentences can be analyzed as a kind of aspectual mismatch between the higher-order construction and the embedded tenses. Yet at a more basic, epistemic level of analysis, there is no mismatch: the full-verb inversion construction and the embedded tenses are similar in the sense that both report events that are conceived of as fully and instantly identifiable.

Aspectual coercion

Dynamic verbs followed by the perfective aspect morpheme -le (V-le) in Chinese typically designate bounded events but can also encode states. This article proposes that the eventive designations are at the basic level and the stative interpretations are at the derived level through aspectual coercion. The categorical shifts from the former to the latter may be brought about by a number of factors, which include sentences with nonagent subject/topic, general stative sentences, and certain adverbs. These factors introduce aspectual properties incompatible with V-le's basic-level eventive interpretation. They trigger a coercion procedure to reconcile the incompatibilities, leading to aspectual reinterpretations. These findings are discussed in light of the principle of external override and the analytic nature of the Chinese language.

Percepção do tempo: da psicologia para a psicolinguística

As pesquisas sobre a percepção do tempo surgiram na psicologia com o objetivo de compreender os mecanismos envolvidos na cronobiologia, na estimação do tempo subjetivo e na coordenação temporal de algumas respostas motoras. Os avanços alcançados nesta disciplina resultaram em um modelo de processamento de informação que visa explicar nossa estimação do tempo subjetivo. Os estudos da linguagem lidam frequentemente com fenômenos de ordem temporal, como a coerção aspectual. A coerção ocorre quando um verbo pontual é inserido em contextos durativos, forçando uma leitura iterativa do evento [a criança espirrou o tempo todo]. Apenas recentemente, porém, o conhecimento sobre a percepção do tempo alcançaria a linguística, expandindo as previsões do fenômeno da coerção aspectual. Este trabalho consiste em uma breve revisão dos principais conceitos em percepção do tempo, buscando relaciona-los com as atuais hipóteses sobre coerção.********************************************************************The perception of time: from Psychology to PsycholinguisticsAbstract: Research on time perception born aiming at understanding the mechanisms underlying chronobiology, the estimation of subjective time and the temporal coordination of some motor responses. The progress made by the discipline raised an information processing model that explains the cognitive mechanisms involved in the psychological time. Linguistic research also deals with some time-related phenomena, such as aspectual coercion. Coercion occurs when a punctual verb is inserted into durative contexts, forcing an iterative reading of the event [the child sneezed all the day long]. Only recently the concepts of subjective time reached the research on language and expanded the predictions of some linguistic phenomena. The present paper consists of a brief review of the main concepts on time perception, aiming at stablishing a relation between the psychology of time and the psycholinguistics of aspectual coercion.Keywords: Time perception; Cognitive psychology; Psycholinguistics; Aspectual coercion