Cognitive Linguistics
The paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility between verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross linguistic differences in the acceptability of non conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2) 266 304; Yoon, Soyeon. 2019. Coercion and language change: A usage based approach. Linguistic Research 36(1) 111 139) We present an online experiment on valency coercion (the first one on Italian) bymeans of a semantic priming protocol inspired by Johnson, Matt A. Adele E. Goldberg. 2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language Cognitive Processes 28(10) 1439 1452. We test priming effects with a lexical decision task which presents different target verbs preceded by coercion instances of four Italian argument structure constructions, which serve as primes. Three types of verbs serve as target: lexical associate (LA) construction associate (CA) and unrelated (U) verbs. LAs are semantically similar to the main verb of the prime sentence, whereas CAs are prototypical verbs associated to the prime construction. U verbs serve as amean of comparison for the two categories of interest. Results confirm that processing of valency coercion requires an integration of both lexical and constructional semantics. Moreover, compatibility is also found to influence coercion resolution. Specifically, constructional priming is LB is responsible for experiment design, data collection, statistical analyses and the drafting of the present paper. FP is responsible for experiment design, help in statistical analyses, and drafting of the present paper. AL is responsible for experiment design, help in statistical analyses, and help in drafting the present paper. *Corresponding author: Lucia Busso, Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, E mail: l.busso@aston.ac.uk Florent Perek, Department of English and Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, E mail: f.b.perek@bham.ac.uk Alessandro Lenci, Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura, e Linguistica, Universita di Pisa, Pisa, Italy, E mail: alessandro.lenci@unipi.it Cognitive Linguistics 2021; 32(2) 287 318 Open Access. (c) 2021 Lucia Busso et al. published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. primary and independent from compatibility. A secondary priming effect for LA verbs is also found, which suggests a contribution of lexical semantics in coercion resolution especially for low compatibility coercion coinages.