Object type effects on the processing of Chinese aspectual verbs in complement coercion

Abstract

This study investigates whether object types influence the processing of Chinese aspectual verbs in complement coercion. Previous research has claimed that Chinese aspectual verbs (e.g., kāishǐ “start”) require an event-denoting object and typically combine with a verb phrase. If this claim holds true, then when these verbs take a noun phrase (NP), whether the NP denotes an event or an entity, the processing patterns are assumed to be similar, as they share the same syntactic structure (aspectual verb + NP) and lack a verb between the aspectual verb and its NP object. Using a self-paced reading experiment and two norming tests, this study measured reading times of Chinese speakers on NP objects (EntityNP vs. EventNP) preceded by aspectual verbs and neutral verbs as controls (selecting either an EventNP or EntityNP), as in kāishǐ/zhǔnbèi zhè-fú zuòpǐn/zhè-cì tiáo-sè “started/prepared this artwork/color-mixing. The results showed that aspectual verbs paired with EntityNPs (complement coercion instances) elicited longer reading times than those paired with EventNPs, and such a difference was not found between the two kinds of expressions with neutral verbs. The findings suggest that object types affect the processing of Chinese aspectual verbs. The detected processing difficulty of aspectual verbs with EntityNP objects was more likely due to the enriched composition of the expressions (where the EntityNP is coerced from an entity into an event sense to satisfy the verb’s selectional constraints), which goes beyond the effect of any potential syntactic irregularities following the aspectual verb. This study underscores the importance of considering both semantic and syntactic factors when examining the processing of aspectual verbs in Chinese, and it provides a foundation for future research to build upon.