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Alexandra Anna Spalek & Matthew Gotham (eds.)

Approaches to Coercion and Polysemy

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General editors: Atle Grønn and Dag Haug

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Alexandra Anna Spalek University of Oslo Matthew Gotham University of Oslo

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Alexandra Anna Spalek & Matthew Gotham (eds.)

Approaches to Coercion and Polysemy

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Introduction 1 Alexandra Anna Spalek & Matthew Gotham

Polysemous posture in English: A case study of non-literal mean-

ing 9

Katherine Fraser

I’m done my homework: Complement Coercion and Aspectual

Adjectives in Canadian English ²⁹

Patrick Murphy

Dispensing with Unwanted Polysemy: Verbal Idioms and the Lex-

icon ⁴⁷

Jan Wiślicki

Semelfactives 65

Markus Egg

Coercion in Languages in Flux 83

Robin Cooper

Counting Constructions and Coercion: Container, Portion and

Measure Interpretations ⁹⁷

Peter R. Sutton & Hana Filip

Identity Criteria of CNs: Quantification and Copredication ¹²¹

Stergios Chatzikyriakidis & Zhaohui Luo

Coercion as Proof Search in Dependent Type Semantics 143 Eriko Kinoshita, Koji Mineshima & Daisuke Bekki

v

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introduction

A L E X A N D R A A N N A S P A L E K & M A T T H E W G O T H A M University of Oslo

[1] b a c k g r o u n d t o t h i s i s s u e : t h e c o p o 2 0 1 7 wo r k s h o p

Coercionis the term used for a variety of phenomena whereby the interpretation of an expression seems to vary depending on another expression that it stands in a predication or modification relationship with. Some examples of coercion that are prominently discussed in the literature are given in the following sentences and contrasts, along with possible interpretations.

(1) a. Fred began a book. began reading?

b. Fred began an essay. began writing?

(2) a. Fred is a good boy. morally good?

b. Fred is a good pianist. good at playing?

(3) a. Fred froze the water.

b. Fred froze the bottle. the contents of the bottle?

(4) a. Fred drinks coffee.

b. Fred drank two coffees. two cups of coffee?

(5) a. Fred played the sonata for 1 min. a complete sonata?

b. Fred played the piano for 10 years. without pause?

Coercion is widespread and has often been remarked on within formal semantics, pragmatics and computational linguistics (Pustejovsky 1995; Egg 2003;

de Swart 2011;Asher 2011;Dölling 2014;Piñango & Deo 2016;Lukassek & Spalek 2018;Nunberg 1979;Recanati 2004). However, the nature of coercion remains not well-understood in various respects and its theoretical account is still much discussed. Thus the workshopApproaches to Coercion and Polysemy(CoPo 2017), held at the University of Oslo on 20–21 November 2017, was organized so as to particularly focus on the following questions:

• To what extent do examples like(1)–(5) represent a unified phenomenon, and what constrains the availability of these kinds of enriched interpretations?

• What do these examples tell us about the nature of the lexicon, and the nature of predication?

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– To what extent do we need lexical meaning to be context-dependent?

– To what extent do we need a more sophisticated compositional system than is commonly assumed in formal semantics?

• How can the coerced interpretation be formally implemented?

It was our intention in organizing the workshop to create a forum to enable comparison of lexical, compositional and pragmatic approaches to these questions, and interaction between people coming from formal semantics, pragmatics and computational linguistics backgrounds. We were particularly interested in the interaction between coercion and the wider issue of polysemy, where a word may have more than one closely-related meaning.

In the event, we had contributions looking at coercion and polysemy from the perspectives, and using the techniques, of psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, syntax, distributional semantics and logical semantics. We had semantic analyses couched in simple type theory (Church 1940) but also in various extended type theories: Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995), Type Theory with Records (Cooper 2005), Type Composition Logic (Asher 2011), and variations on Martin- Löf’s intuitionistic type theory (Martin-Löf 1975, 1984). The programme of the workshop was as follows:

(i) Katherine Fraser: Polysemy of an English Posture Verb: A Case Study of Non- Literal Meaning

(ii) Patrick Murphy: ‘I’m done my homework’: Complement Coercion and Aspectual Adjectives in Canadian English

(iii) Jan Wiślicki: Dispensing with Unwanted Polysemy: Deriving Verbal Idioms by Co- ercive Typing

(iv) Nicholas Asher: Type Presuppositions and Fine Grained Types: From Coercion to Co-composition and a Finer Grained Look at Determiners

(v) Julia Lukassek: Coercion and Underspecification Integrated: The State-Event- Ambiguity of Aspectual Verbs

(vi) Markus Egg: Semelfactives

(vii) Bryan Leferman:The Aspectual Uniformity of Evaluative Adjectives

(viii) Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci & Philippe Blache:Modeling the Com- positional Cost of Logical Metonymies with Distributional Semantics

(ix) Robin Cooper:Coercion in Languages in Flux

OSLa volume 10(2), 2018

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(x) Peter Sutton & Hana Filip: Coercion: Container, Contents and Measure Readings (xi) Stergios Chatzikyriakidis & Zhaohui Luo: Identity Criteria of CNs: Quantifica-

tion and Copredication

(xii) Eriko Kinoshita, Koji Mineshima & Daisuke Bekki: Coercion as Proof Search in Dependent Type Semantics

(xiii) Alexandra Anna Spalek & Matthew Gotham:Closing Comments and Discussion Abstracts of the talks are available online atwww.tinyurl.com/CoPo2017/.

[2] t h i s s p e c i a l i s s u e o f o s l o s t u d i e s i n l a n g u a g e ( o s l a )

This special issue of OSLa contains eight of the contributions from the CoPo 2017 workshop. The first four articles in this volume present diverse rich empirical data, both documenting novel contexts where we find coercion (see Fraser and Murphy) and providing new theoretical accounts of well-known phenomena (see Wiślicki and Egg).

The article that opens the volume provides a rich description of English posture verbs with a special focus onsit. Based on an in-depth exploration of English corpus data, Katherine Fraser illustrates that posture verbs are regularly ambiguous between their literal and non-literal readings, but thatsitstands out in that its non-literal meaning does not merely encode a posture orientation in a metaphorical extension. Rather, it is regularly ambiguous between its primary meaning that describes a sitting posture and its secondary meaning that denotes an idle state, frequently with a negative connotation. In its secondary reading, sitputs no constraints on the position, but requires a location argument and restricts the state to be transitory, expressed either by means of progressive aspect or a secondary predicate. Fraser’s case study of English posture verbs thus points to the need for coercion as a regular reinterpretation mechanism.

The second article reports on an eye-tracking experiment that examines an English dialectal construction, where coercion is at play. After testing processing times for the Canadian EnglishI’m done/finished+ noun phrase, Patrick Murphy reports increased processing times for the construction, when the noun phrase denotes an entity (e.g. comic), but not when it denotes an event (e.g.audition). These experimental results are reminiscent of what is known about aspectual verbs like finish, which trigger complement coercion with entity denoting nouns. Murphy interprets the additional processing cost ofI’m done/finished the comicin line with a previous proposal by Fruehwald & Myler(2015), who argued thatdoneandfin- ishedare adjectival versions of aspectual verbs that semantically select for event descriptions and trigger complement coercion in case of entity-denoting nouns.

This psycholinguistic paper thus reports clear coercion effects for the Canadian

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English construction in support of Fruehwald & Myler (2015), and although it favors a type-shifting account, it leaves room for further theoretical discussion about the exact nature of the underlying semantic adjustments.

The third article in the collection, by Jan Wiślicki, turns to idioms as a po- tential empirical challenge, likely to represent a disruption in the compositional system. It points out that, traditionally, idioms have been understood as non- compositional units that are stored in the lexicon as variants of polysemous lexical items. In opposition to this view, the author develops a novel way of ana- lysing idioms, which fits with general linguistic processes. Based on a couple of well-known examples, Wiślicki shows that idioms can be understood as emerging from cyclic derivation and a kind of structural coercion, where syntactic derivation marks the proper points for lexicalization of the strictly idiomatic parts. Co- ercion in this paper is thus redefined in a novel way as a pre-semantic operation that occurs at the derivation level and serves in storing complex conceptual information that can become a lexicalized item. Combining these two mechanisms allows Wiślicki to give an explanation for the puzzling property of idioms which exhibit atomic behaviour alongside varying degrees of morphosyntactic accessib- ility and flexibility.

The fourth article, by Markus Egg, discusses the class of semelfactive verbs and their variable aspectual properties in English and contrasts them with Rus- sian and Hungarian, which use richer verb morphology to indicate aspectual differences. After reviewing previous analyses of semelfactives, the author defends an account that treats semelfactives as denoting singleton eventualities, whereas the iterative use of semelfactives in English is derived as a result of aspectual coercion. In line with his previous works on other meaning adjustment phenomena (Egg 2003, for example), Egg models coercion in terms of a suitable operator (here:

an iterative coercion operator), which avoids an impending aspectual mismatch for semelfactives that are the complement of durative verbs such askeep onor are modified by durative adverbials. By postulating a coercion operator for the iterative readings of semelfactives the author turns to a well-known semantic resource that helps to avoid compositional conflicts and dispenses with unnecessary polysemy.

The final four articles in this volume explore various linguistic phenomena involving coercion and polysemy using extended type theories which, to a greater or lesser degree, make meaning adjustments something to be expected. The fifth article, by Robin Cooper, is a programmatic paper in which he outlines and motivates a view of linguistic semantics according to which it is a somewhat chaotic system subject to communicative constraints. On this view, coercion does not represent a disturbance in a highly formal and precise linguistic system, but rather a regu- larization of a highly flexible one. Cooper illustrates this perspective on language by means of two case studies, which he analyzes using Type Theory with Records

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(TTR). The first is the phenomenon of what Krifka (1990) called ‘event-related readings’; for example, the interpretation offour thousand ships passed through the lockinvolving quantification not over ships, but over lock traversals. The second is the development of dynamic generalized quantifier theory, which is argued to be an example of where property coercions are part of the basic compositional semantic system, rather than something used only to generate additional interpretations for expressions.

In the sixth article, Peter R. Sutton and Hana Filip provide an analysis in TTR of the various coercion interpretations that are available when a numerical quantifier combines with a mass noun, as in e.g.two beers. They note that the container interpretation (‘two glasses filled with beer’) and the portion interpretation (‘two portions of beer, each equivalent to the contents of one glass’) are easier to arrive at than the measure interpretation (‘beer to the amount of two glassfuls’)—which is some ways is surprising, since this discrepancy is not evident for the equivalent full pseudo-partitivetwo glasses of beer. They argue that the explanation is that the measure interpretation is derived by an additional coercion from the portion interpretation which, along with the container interpretation, is lexically encoded in a dot-type in the sense ofPustejovsky(1995). They motivate this analysis with data from copredication.

The seventh article also deals with copredication data. Building on previous work that interprets common nouns as types and addresses copredication by means of dot-types in a subtype hierarchy, e.g. in whichbookis a subtype of phys•infowhich is a subtype of phys, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis and Zhaohui Luo expand their analysis to account for entailment data in copredication sentences that rely on e.g. books-as-physical-objects having different individuation criteria to books-as-informational-objects. The crucial element is to interpret common nouns as setoids, i.e. pairs consisting of a type and an equivalence relation. This then opens up the possibility that these equivalence relations are not necessarily preserved when moving from a type to any of its supertypes, which turns out to be exactly what is required to account for the entailment data in copredication.

In the eighth and final article, Eriko Kinoshita, Koji Mineshima and Daisuke Bekki give an account of coercion behaviour that isn’t triggered by a type mismatch; an example would be an interpretation ofthe lion escapedin whichthe lion is interpreted as referring to an actor playing the part of a lion. Building on previous work in Dependent Type Semantics (DTS) that treats selectional restrictions as presuppositions, and presupposition satisfaction as resolved by type checking, they present an account according to which each predicate encodes a ‘transfer frame’, which expresses the presupposition that there is a contextually salient relation between the argument to the predicate and something satisfying the selectional restrictions of the predicate (where identity is always contextuallly salient).

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[3] r e f l e c t i o n s

The contributions to the CoPo 2017 workshop, and this volume, show natural language to be a highly flexible and adaptable system. Whether or not we take this flexibility and adaptability to be evidence, as Cooper puts it in this volume, that ‘speakers of a natural language are constantly in the process of creating new language to meet the needs of novel situations in which they find themselves’, they indicate that meaning adjustments described ascoercionandpolysemyare too widespread and multifaceted to be viewed simply as the exception that proves the rule. This is the reason why more and more research in formal semantics, pragmatics and computational linguistics is making an effort to meet the needs of natural language and incorporate adjustment mechanisms, such as coercion, as a part of their regular inventory of tools.

What the diversity of empirical data and theoretical approaches united in this volume however also illustrate, is that enriched interpretations and the nature of coercion are still a very rich area of ongoing research, on which diverse research- ers differ in the way they understand, constrain and formalise coercion.

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

The CoPo 2017 workshop was funded jointly by the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, and the Department of Philosophy, Classics, His- tory of Art and Ideas, at the University of Oslo. It would not have been possible without the help of our session chairs and others who helped with practicalities:

Elena Callegari, Atle Grønn, Nick Allott, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Kjell Johan Sæbø, Dag Haug and Cathrine Fabricius Hansen. We are also greatly indebted to our review- ers for both the workshop and this volume. The intellectual energy behind the workshop came from interactions in the SynSem research programme in the Fac- ulty of Humanities at the University of Oslo, which we will remember very fondly.

r e f e r e n c e s

Asher, Nicholas. 2011. Lexical meaning in context. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.

Church, Alonzo. 1940. A formulation of the simple theory of types. The Journal of Symbolic Logic5(2). 56–68.

Cooper, Robin. 2005. Records and record types in semantic theory.Journal of Logic and Computation15(2). 99–112.

Dölling, Johannes. 2014. Aspectual coercion and eventuality structure. In Klaus Robering (ed.),Events, arguments, and aspects: Topics in the semantics of verbs, 189–

226. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Egg, Markus. 2003. Beginning novels and finishing hamburgers: Remarks on the semantics ofto begin. Journal of Semantics20(2). 163–191. doi:10.1093/jos/20.2.

163.

Fruehwald, Josef & Neil Myler. 2015. I’m done my homework – case assignment in a stative passive. Linguistic Variation15(2). 141–168.

Krifka, Manfred. 1990. Four thousand ships passed through the lock. Linguistics and Philosophy13. 487–520.

Lukassek, Julia & Alexandra Anna Spalek. 2018. Distinguishing coercion and underspecification in Type Composition Logic. In Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt (eds.),Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 71–87. ZAS.

Martin-Löf, Per. 1975. An intuitionistic theory of types: Predicative part. In H.E.

Rose & J.C. Shepherdson (eds.), Logic colloquium ‘73 (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics 80), 73–118. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Martin-Löf, Per. 1984. Intuitionistic type theory. Naples: Bibliopolis.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1979. The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy.

Linguistics and Philosophy3(2). 143–184. doi:10.1007/BF00126509.

Piñango, Maria Mercedes & Ashwini Deo. 2016. Reanalyzing the complement coercion effect through a generalized lexical semantics for aspectual verbs. Journal of Semantics33(2). 359–408.

Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Recanati, François. 2004.Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

de Swart, Henriëtte. 2011. Mismatches and coercion. In Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner & Klaus von Heusinger (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, 574–597. Berlin: de Gruyter.

a u t h o r c o n ta c t i n f o r m at i o n Alexandra Anna Spalek

University of Oslo

[email protected] Matthew Gotham

University of Oslo

[email protected]

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polysemous posture in english:

a case study of non-literal meaning

K A T H E R I N E F R A S E R

University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) a b s t r a c t

It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/

‘stand’/lie can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding posture or spatial orientation (seeNewman 2002for an overview). In the cognitive literature, the conceptual background of these extensions has been discussed, but up to now, there has been no discussion of the non-literal senses in the theoretical linguistic literature, including how the different senses are disambiguated. This paper supplements the cognitive descriptions of posture verbs, presenting data from an independent corpus study and proposing a formal analysis. The in-depth investigation of one English posture verb, ‘sit’, yields an empirical generalization that contributes to the discussion surrounding non-literal meaning.

[1] i n t r o d u c t i o n

The focus of this paper is the English verb ‘to sit’. This verb belongs to a group of verbs known as posture verbs, which canonically describe animate subjects in

“at-rest” positions (Newman 2002). The stative meaning of ‘sit’ in its literal sense is ‘to be in a sitting position (at locationz)’, like the human subject in(1-a). The meaning in the non-literal sense is ‘to be atz’, like the inanimate subject in(1-b).¹

(1) a. Sam is sitting on the bench. literal

b. The book is sitting on the bench. non-literal For the literal use in(1-a)to be felicitous, the human subject must be at-rest, in a “relatively compact position” (Newman 2002: 2; cp. “elongated position”, either vertical or horizontal, for ‘stand’ or ‘lie’), her upper body must be vertical, and her buttocks must be located on the flat part of the bench (cp., e.g., ‘stand’, where the subject’s feet would have to be the body part on top of the bench). For the non-literal use in(1-b)to be felicitous, the inanimate subject must be not in

[1] The brackets following the example indicate whether the examples are from a web search [web], a Google Books result [books], or from Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-) [COCA]; any em- phasis or indices in these examples are my own markings; examples without marked sources are my own [KF].

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use, or “idle”, and physically located on the bench; there are no requirements for position when ‘sit’ is used in the non-literal sense. Utterances like(1-b)are not the same as, e.g.,This house is sitting on a fortune., because the subject is not physically located on the fortune. This paper’s object of study is the locative, non-literal ‘sit’, particularly in English.

Although posture verbs have been observed to be polysemous, non-literal uses have been largely ignored in the theoretical linguistic literature. Investigations of these verbs in the cognitive literature have focused on conceptual ideas behind their meaning (seeNewman 2002for a cross-linguistic overview; Lemmens 2002 for Dutch), frequencies of their literal meaning in English (Newman 2009;New- man & Rice 2004, inter alia) or a description of the various non-literal uses of one posture verb, i.e., Gibbs et al. (1994) on Englishstand. The current study builds upon these findings, and examines the complex lexical semantics of one English posture verb, ‘sit’. (2) is a naturally-occurring example of the use of ‘sit’ under investigation; the relevant predicate is boldfaced.

(2) It’s sort of ironic that thescotch is sittingthere unopened after two experiments, and we don’t know whether it would be a good idea to toast these

results or not. [COCA]

In the example, the boldfaced phrase contains a subject and the verb ‘sit’. This sentence is interesting because in the real, non-comic book, world, bottles can- not be in a sitting position. There is also an additional layer of meaning, contrib- uted bysittingitself. Namely, with the inclusion of this lexical item, an evaluative meaning is added to the descriptive one. In(2), the phrasesit’s sort of ironicandwe don’t know whether it’s a good ideaare indicative of anxiety or uncertainty, normally negatively-valued emotions, regarding the unopened, unused, state of the scotch bottle. Without sitting, a sentence like (3-a)is odd with the ironic evaluation; a sentence like(3-b)is felicitous, with the addition of the aspectual adverbstill.

(3) a. #It’s sort of ironic that the scotch is there unopened.

b. It’s sort of ironic that the scotch isstillthere unopened.

One goal of this investigation is to examine the possible interaction of aspect and evaluation in non-literal ‘sit’. States are typically not felicitous in the progressive aspect. However, as observed byComrie(1976), English states can sometimes appear with the progressive to encode a contingent, temporary state. The corpus study presented here will take a look at the differences in frequency of evaluation between when ‘sit’ is used with the progressive or simple past.

This non-literal use of ‘sit’ is also interesting, as it is not restricted to idioms like in the closely-related German(4). In both of the utterances of(4), the subject is not located in or at the argument of the prepositional phrase; the interpretation

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is idiomatic and not compositional. This paper will concern only non-idiomatic, non-literal uses of the posture verb, such as in(1-b)and(2).

(4) german a. Lovis

Lovis saß sat

zwischen between

Baum tree

und and

Borke.

bark

‘Lovis was faced with a difficult/unpleasant decision.’

b. Mattis Mattis

saß sat

auf on

einem a

Pulverfass.

powder-keg

‘Mattis was in a precarious situation.’

The primary goal of this paper is to describe just what the non-literalsittingen- compasses. Observations from the literature about non-literalsittingare presented, and then empirically looked at with a qualitative corpus search. The main finding of the exploratory study is that, in addition to an obligatory location argument, aspect influences when non-literal ‘sit’ can be used: a temporary interpretation is a condition on felicity; progressive morphology or a secondary predicate can fulfill this requirement. Secondarily, this paper is interested in the source of the evaluation. One hypothesis is that the source comes from aspectual coercion, but I will show how the evaluative component’s source is, in fact, not due to the sitting-state being coerced in the progressive.

Within the goal of probing the lexical semantics, I am interested in what mechanism(s) are involved in disambiguating the different senses of ‘sit’. I will argue that the lexical entry for ‘sit’ comprises an animate subject, a posture predicate, anat-restpredicate, and an optional location slot. Following Asher(2011);

Lukassek & Spalek (2018), I assume that there is one lexical entry for the possible senses. When the selectional restrictions of literal ‘sit’ aren’t met, i.e., when there is an inanimate subject, the meaning of ‘sit’ is reinterpreted, from the literal meaning of ‘an animate subject at-rest in a sitting position (at locationz)’ to the non-literal meaning of ‘inanimate subject idle at locationz’. In other words, coercion is at play here, and the literal meaning of at-rest in a sitting posture is reinterpreted as not in use (idle), in no particular posture.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section[2] presents an overview of posture verbs, both in their literal and non-literal senses. Section [3]describes the exploratory corpus study that was undertaken to better understand the construction. Section[4]discusses the findings, including the transiency constraint, and Section[5]concludes.

[2] p o s t u r e v e r b s

The cardinal posture verbs are ‘sit’, ‘lie’, and ‘stand’—not, e.g., ‘crouch’ or ‘lean’—

because the former are the only posture verbs to exhibit cross-linguistic gram-

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maticalisation patterns (Kuteva 1999;Newman 2002). ‘Sit’, ‘lie’,or ‘stand’ are the core posture verbs used as locational or existential predicates and often as tense or aspect markers (seeNewman 2002for an overview). Kuteva(1999) proposes a path of grammaticalisation as in(5).

(5) posture > locative/existential > aspect

The literal use of an English posture verb represents the first stage of (5), which concerns the spatial configuration of animate subjects, and the non-literal use is in the second, where spatial configuration sometimes constrains the lexical choice but not always (more below). Dutch and Norwegian are examples of languages where posture verbs have been grammaticalised, becoming a functional word (see, e.g.,Lemmens 2005;Fraser & Pots 2018for Dutch andLødrup 2002for Norwegian). As is often the case for partially grammaticalised locational predicates (Comrie 1976), posture verbs are used as a progressive aspect marker, in addition to the posture and locative/existential uses; cf. (6).²

(6) Omdat because

ik I

achter after

een a

trein train

aan at

zit sit

te to

hollen, run,

heb have

ik I

de the

trein train

waar where

ik I eigenlijk

actually in in

hoor have

te to

zitten sit

gemist.

missed

‘Because I was running for a train, I missed the one that I actually had to

be [sitting] in.’ [dutch,Lemmens 2005, p. 205]

This example includes two instances ofzitten: the first, boldfaced, is in the periphrastic progressive construction, and the second, underlined is a simple locative use. The local linguistic context disambiguates the aspectual marker from the locative predicate: te ‘to’ is after the boldfaced auxiliary zit and before the underlined full verb zitten. The boldfaced ‘sit’ of the first clause is missing in the English translation because would contradict the main predicate’s semantics—

sitting and running simultaneously is impossible; this first instance of ‘to sit’ in (6) is an example of a semantically-bleached, grammaticalised posture verb. In fact, Lemmens (2005, 189) reports that the posture verb is “essentially obligatory” in locational expressions; usingzijn‘to be’ in such utterances is very marked or even ungrammatical for some speakers. In English, the simple copula is pre- ferred in locational expressions (Newman 2002), indicating that Dutch is further along than English on the path of grammaticalisation. This paper concerns the instances of ‘sit’ in locative, non-literal posture uses. Henceforth, the discussion will be centered on English.

The locative use of ‘sit’ can be lexically ambiguous with the posture use. This can be seen in(7). The utterance in(7) is infelicitous because it forces the inter-

[2] All Dutch examples from Lemmens have been double-checked with a native speaker: Cora Pots (p.c.).

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pretation that the second clause’s subject,book, is in a sitting position. As books are non-pliable, this is pragmatically odd.

(7) John was sitting on the floor #…and the book was, too.

The following subsections discuss the linguistic differences between non-literal and literal senses of core posture verbs. We will begin more broadly, looking at all three core verbs, before narrowing in on ‘sit’.

[2.1] Non-literal posture and its constraints

Before beginning the discussion on differences between non-literal and literal

‘sit’, let us define what it means to be literally sitting. As mentioned in the introduction, literal ‘sit’ describes an animate subject at-rest, in a posture of sitting.

The relevant posture is to in a compact position, with a vertical upper body and the buttocks on/at a contextually-specified location. The position of the legs is not important; it is only important that the legs are positioned relatively perpendicular to the upper body. For an inanimate object to be described as in a sitting position, this object would also have to be compact in the sense that the upper and lower parts are perpendicular. This is in contrast to ‘stand’ or ‘lie’, both of which concern only an elongated posture.

For non-literal, non-idiomatic uses of core posture verbs, both thethemeand locationarguments are obligatory. Compare the literal uses, where thelocation can be felicitously omitted; cp. (8-a)/(8-b).

(8) (Non-)omissibility of location

a. The woman is sitting (on the couch). literal

b. My toothbrush is sitting #(in the sink). non-literal Maienborn (1996) observed that when the locational PP is omitted in a posture verb construction, the posture of the subject becomes salient. Asthe woman denotes an animate subject, and can be in a sitting position, it is possible to omit thelocationin (a). In contrast,my toothbrushdenotes an inanimate subject and not capable of sitting, so it is infelicitous for the posture meaning to be salient in (b). This shows us that, unlike the literal use, the non-literal use ofsittingdoes not actually encode the meaning ‘to sit’. I proposelocation-omission as a diagnostic

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for disambiguating literal and non-literal posture.³

A second difference between the literal and non-literal senses is that the literal sense requires an animate subject. As we saw in (7) above, it is difficult to combine an inanimate subject with literal ‘sit’. Even with a more flexible subject, like a pillow ina pillow is sitting, there is a funny, forced, animate interpretation—

and the utterance is marked. The other two core posture verbs, ‘lie’ and ‘stand’, also require an animate subject in their literal senses, although in the non-literal use (able to be disambiguated with the abovelocation-omission test), the subject’s spatial orientation is still strongly encoded.

I claim here that the literal sense of a posture verb encodes the body position of animate subjects, not inanimates, and propose the argument structure in (9) for literal posture verbs. This entry builds onLevin & Rappaport-Hovav(1995)’s entry, and includes anat-restpredicate, animate subject,posturepredicate, and the optional location insights from above. The at-restpredicate is representat- ive of that state the subject is in. Namely, when in a sitting state, the subject is not moving around with their legs or whole body. Of course, it is possible to be involved in working or eating/drinking while sitting, but in those cases the legs are still at-rest.

(9) Literal posture= [ xanim[idle-be&posture([atz ])]]

Posture is salient for the subjects of ‘lie’ and ‘stand’, even in the metaphorical extension (regardless of the subject’s animacy). According to Lemmens (2002), these are the maximal orientations for humans, being maximally elongated along the vertical or horizontal axis, and this maximality restricts variation in the spatial configurations they encode. Lemmens’ work is on Dutch, but English data supporting this can be seen in the sentences below.

(10) a. The papersareon the floor.

b. The paperslayon the floor.

c. #The papersstoodon the floor.

[3] Relevant here is the event-external location, not the event-internal location. According toMaienborn (2003), event-internal locations modify the manner of the event, rather than describing the location. For example, in(i)the underlined event-internal location describes how the standing eventuality occurred (using the back flippers to prop itself up); whereas the boldfaced event-external location describes where it occurred (near the swimming pool).

(i) The sea lion stood on its back flippersnext to the pool.

As the event-internal location adds additional information about the posture of the subject in the eventuality, it is odd to combine such a phrase with non-literalsit; cf.(ii).

(ii) #The bottle was sitting on its underside.

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The pieces of paper in(10) are felicitous withlay, but notstood. This makes sense when one thinks about a sheet of paper: it is thin, having virtually no vertical dimension, so that the horizontal dimension is the salient one. In this way, something without a vertical dimension is not capable of standing, and instead is used with the appropriate horizontally-oriented verb, lying. These simple ex- amples indicate that orientation can still be strongly encoded in some English posture verbs, even when used in a metaphorical extension.

Interestingly, in contrast to ‘lie’ and ‘stand’, it is possible to felicitously combine ‘sit’ with an additional posture predicate. In the examples of(11), the second predicate, underlined, describes the orientation, and ‘sit’, the location.

(11) a. I am just glad I am seeing Sarah McLachlan Friday before the season starts, if I didn’t [sic] have something to do, I would be sitting at homepacing all weekend lol. I hope everyone has something to oc- cupy themselves for the weekend, I sure as hell gonna need it.[web]

b. […] we passed markets full of colourful fruit; pineapples, bananas, and papayassatstacked high on wooden tables. [web]

In (a) the predicatesitting at homeis not actually interpreted as being in a seated position at one’s home. If that were the case, the addition of the second posture verb would be odd. However, it is this second verb pacing, which describe the relevant posture, while ‘sit’ is locative . Similarly, in (b), the underlinedstacked highdescribes a vertically-oriented configuration, while ‘sit’ locates the fruits on tables. As such, these non-literal uses of ‘sit’ represent the second step in the grammaticalisation path(5), location/existence.

Interestingly, there is another difference between non-literal ‘sit’ and ‘stand’/

‘lie’ constructions: those with ‘sit’ carry an additional expectation about the idleness, in the sense that the sitting state is expected or wished to change at one point. The three sentences in(12)illustrate.

(12) a. The shark issittingin its tank, waiting for the next feeding.

b. The shark islyingin its tank (#waiting for the next feeding).

dead

c. #The shark isstandingin its tank.

The first variant(12-a), withsitting, does not concern posture at all: the shark is not in a seated position but is idle, it is possible to append a continuation with content indicating a more active state is expected in the future. The situation changes with ‘lie’ in(12-b): the animal is at-rest, yes, but a future expectation is less plausible, as native speakers⁴interpret the shark as being dead or asleep. In (12-c), the use of the posture verb is infelicitous for the simple reason that ‘stand’

[4] By informal survey.

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requires a vertical orientation and sharks, in the real world, do not stand, nor do they swim in a vertical orientation. These shark examples, as well as those in(11) above, demonstrate that (i) non-literal, locative ‘sit’ lacks a posture entailment and (ii) is accompanied by an evaluation.

Considering the above, I propose the argument structures in(13)for the non- literal posture senses. Both entries allow animate or inanimate subjects, encode an “at-rest” state (idle), and require alocation. The difference is that ‘stand’/‘lie’

(a) also encode the posture, while ‘sit’ (b) does not.

(13) Argument structure of non-literal, locative posture

a. ‘stand’/‘lie’= [ x_±anim[idle-be&posture[atz ] ] ] b. ‘sit’= [ x_±anim[idle-be[atz ] ] ]

The next subsection will look more closely at only non-literal ‘sit’, as it be- haves differently from the other two core verbs. More specifically, this subsection will be concerned with the additional aspectual interaction.

[2.2] A closer look at non-literal ‘sit’

In addition to its core meaning of ‘idleness’ and locating its subject somewhere, the locative use of non-literal ‘sit’ has an inference concerning speaker evaluation of the sitting state, which seems to be related to the state’s temporal interval. This subsection will explore this further, first by comparing minimal pairs (with and without ‘sit’), then by adding aspectual particles such as still, and finally with a comparison to lexical aspect. To begin, the scotch example from the introduction is repeated here as(14); (a) is the original sentence from COCA and (b) is the modified sentence, withoutsitting. Underlined in these two sentences is an evaluative phrase, it’s sort of ironic. The adapted example (b) is intended to see whether an overt evaluation is felicitous with non-literal ‘sit’.

(14) a. It’s sort of ironic that the scotch issittingthere unopened after two experiments, and we don’t know whether it would be a good idea to

toast these results or not. [COCA]

b. #It’s sort of ironic that the scotch is there unopened …

Sentence(14-b)has an evaluation, but nositting, and is marked; in informal terms, it feels like something is missing from the sentence. To get a better idea of what is going on, let us try this with another example; see(15)/(16).

(15) a. Alistairihovered in mid water and started shaking the chum bag at the end of hisiflasher, with thesharkjsittingover hisishoulder. Hei

still hadn’t seen it_j. I was a little worried with the shark_jso close […]

Itjwas stationary about a meter and a half off on hisiright, watching

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himiintently. [web; indices by me, KF]

b. Alistair hovered in mid-water […] with the shark_jover his_ishoulder.

Heistill hadn’t seen itj. I was a little worried with the shark so close.

(i) …It_j was stationary about a meter and a half off on his_i right, watching him_iintently.

(ii) …Itjwas swimming slowly towards himi.

In(15-a), the writer describes an uneasy situation where his fishing companion, Alistair, was in close proximity to a shark. The writer explicitly says that they were worried about the shark being so close (underlined), and that it was in an stationary state (stationary) with the implication that the creature was waiting for its next move (watching him intently). When sitting is deleted, like in (15-b), the utterance is felicitous—even with the underlined evaluative content—but the inference about waiting or expecting a change is no longer so salient. For(15-b), it is possible to continue with either a sentence describing a stationary shark (i) or a moving one (ii); for(15-a), the swimming continuation would be marked. As it is possible that the evaluation’s source was the predatory nature of sharks, rather than the predicate ‘sit’, I tried this deletion test with a different context and a non-descript fish(16).

(16) {There are many varieties of fish, big/small, benign/dangerous : } a. The fish wassittingover his shoulder.

I was worried what would happen next.

b. The fish was over his shoulder.

#I was worried what would happen next.

The continuation containing evaluative content is felicitous in (a), but not (b). In- terestingly, utterances like(14-b)and(16-b), without ‘sit’ but with an evaluation, can be “saved” with an aspectual particle likestill. This is seen in(17).

(17) a. It’s sort of ironic that the scotch isstillthere unopened.

b. The fish wasstillover his shoulder. I was worried what would happen next.

The particlestilldescribes an eventuality that is asserted to have begun before the reference time and is inferred to end sometime after the reference time (seeLöb- ner(1989);Krifka(2000) for a formal discussion of aspectual particles). Thatstill improves the felicity of these two utterances which had had ‘sit’ deleted, suggests that non-literal, locative ‘sit’ has a similar inference. In other words, this use of

‘sit’ carries a meaning of transiency.

Asstillis an aspectual particle, I was curious as to whether lexical aspect also

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interacts with the meaning. The progressive is notorious for its inability to have a non-temporary subject like cities or buildings (Dowty 1979). Additionally, it has been noted that the progressive is compatible with an evaluation, particularly in combination with states (Comrie 1976). The minimal pair in(18)shows how an evaluation is needed to combine a building as a subject with progressive ‘sit’.

(18) a. {Sam is describing where different institutions are located : } The library is(#sitting)on the corner of 45th street.

b. {The local library was recently repainted neon orange. Sam, who hates orange, is telling a friend where it is : }

The library is(sitting)on the corner of 45th street.

I propose that the differences seen above arise from the meaning that non-literal, locative ‘sit’ encodes: a temporary state, like waiting, which the speaker can eval- uate.⁵ In order to support this claim, I decided to look at the difference between progressive and simple past forms of non-literal, locative ‘sit.’ The next section will present this study.

[3] e x p l o r at o r y c o r p u s s t u d y

For this corpus study, the two main research questions were (i.) what sort of context dependencies are there for non-literal ‘sit’? and (ii.) does it always co- occur with an evaluation? For the first, based on the descriptive generalisations above, at least alocationis necessary. There is also an interaction with aspect, so it is possible that the sitting state must be temporally bounded. For the second question, my prediction was that it often occurred with a negative evaluation but I did not know if there was a pattern to the distribution. The following subsections will describe the methodology and answers to these two questions.

[3.1] Methodology

The methodology for the qualitative corpus study was created afterSpalek(2014, 2015), whose work also examined the non-literal use of polysemous verbs. Namely, I extracted sentences from the magazine and news categories in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In the last update (December 2015), this corpus had “more than 520 million words in 220,225 texts”,⁶ as well as a user-

[5] I am being purposely vague in characterising the “evaluation”, mostly because I think it is more complex than a simplebad. For space reasons, I will leave this topic aside in this paper.

[6] 533,788,932 words total; 110,110,637 words in the magazine category and 105,963,844 words in the news category [http://corpus.byu.edu/coca; last accessed May 2016].

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friendly interface.⁷ While Spalek’s study explicitly included various argument structures, my investigation ofsittingtargeted only the ontology. This is mainly because it was already known that the relevant, non-literal, use has an inanimate subject argument; whether there the locative PP is necessary was a question for the study. Additional syntagmatic features like a lone preposition indicate irrelevant, overtly dynamic (i.e., encoding the actual spatial orientation) meanings of the posture verb. For this reason, the syntactic categorisation of Spalek’s approach is omitted here.

The specific search query was as in(19), incorporating both forms of simple past and -ing. The first curly brackets contain the subject, with the part-of-speech (POS) tagnn*, for all nouns (excluding proper names). This tag prevents irrelevant results; in this case, of all results without a noun directly preceding the verb.

The second curly bracket is the verb (phrase). When a word is enclosed in square brackets, like with [be]sitting, the command means that it should search for any form of that verb. Finally, in the third curly bracket, there is a minus sign fol- lowed by three prepositions separated by a vertical line, which is anoroperator.

The minus sign indicates that these prepositions were not included in the search.

(19) a. {nn* } { [be] sitting } { –around|down|up } b. {nn* } { sitting } { –around|down|up } c. {nn* } { [sit] } { –around|down|up }

The reason for having both [be]sittingandsittingwas to reduce the possibility of extra factors. Namely, the intention was to eliminate the chance that a full verb phrase versus a participle affected the answers to the research question. Addi- tionally, the choice of a simple verb form was limited to the past tense, because an eventuality in the past can be analysed with respect to the temporal interval, while in the future or present, the endpoint of the interval is unknown. Also, the present encompasses also generic or habitual readings, an unneeded further com- plication for this exploratory study.

The final bracketed part of the search query regards the avoidance of prepositions aftersit. As noted inNewman & Rice(2004),aroundcontributes an expressive meaning, which would have affected the analysis of expressive meaning and non-literalsit. The deliberate omission ofdownandupwas to avoid any dynamic eventualities of assuming/exiting a seated position, which are different than the non-literal posture use being investigated here.

[7] The British National Corpus (BNC) was also considered, but due to its smaller size (96,263,399 words total; 7,261,990 words in the magazine category and 10,466,422 in the news category), and therefore less frequent instances of metaphorical ‘sit’, it was rejected as a source. Future work would ideally compare different dialects of English, instead of focussing solely on American English; since the investigation of

‘sit’ originally took place (Spring/Summer 2016), a new corpus with different dialects of English, Global Web-based English (GloWBE) is available.

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The sentences to be analysed were randomly extracted from the search results. From these extracted sentences, I manually looked at each, omitting any irrelevant uses. Specifically, any literal posture uses were thrown out. This means that the majority of the subjects are inanimates, but if it was determined from the context that an animate was not in a specific posture, the sentence was kept in the database; unclear cases were not included. Also, sentences such as(20)were thrown out, as this metaphorical extension is idiomatic, and therefore different—

even while still referring to inactivity.

(20) For one thing, the wolf isn’t at the door. Apple is sitting on $1.7 billion

in cash and short-term notes. [COCA]

The subject of (20)’s main clause, the company Apple, is not actually located on the money. Rather the company is in possession of it. This sense of ‘sit’ is often used in collocation withonplus money or things of value.

The final number of analysed sentences was 275. All of these utterances had been extracted from the COCA search described above, and all were instances of non-literal ‘sit’.

Annotation

Once the corpus was chosen and the sample set was extracted, the next delibera- tion was annotation. Two main categorizations were relevant for this study: eval- uating the (evaluative) valence of the utterance and annotating the arguments of “sit”. The valence of the sentence refers to whether it was a neutral locative construction, concerning the existence of the subject at a certain location (“locative”), or whether the utterance was accompanied by an evaluation (“expressive”).

This difference was determined from the context provided by COCA, namely the KWIC (“keyword in context”); of course, there were a few unclear cases due to the brevity of the context, which were omitted from the final numbers.

In addition to the valence of the utterance, I annotated the semantic type of the arguments. This annotation was completed based on linguistic intuitions; intuitions are verified by sources such as FrameNet⁸for clues, then standard English dictionaries likeMerriam-Webster(2003).

These two subsections have outlined how I approached the corpus. With that in mind, let us move on to what was discovered.

[3.2] Corpus data

This subsection concerns answers to the two research questions (context dependency of the construction and distribution of evaluation). For more detailed information on the corpus data, see Fraser (2016). Considering the goals of the

[8] https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/ [Last access on 30 May 2016.]

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study (fine-grained semantic examination), the findings were analysed with only a simple statistics. As to the overall numbers: of the 275 collected examples, about two-thirds were the -ingform and the last third as the simple past, as can be seen in Table1.

table 1: Number of examples for each form ofsit.

Form N

[be] sitting 83

sitting 92

sat 100

275

Answering the research questions: Context dependency and evaluativity

The question of whether the construction is dependent on its linguistic context will be addressed here. More specifically, the data reported is the semantics of the possible subject arguments and whether a locative argument is required.

First: beyond inanimate, a specific semantic type of the subject is not a requirement of non-literal, locative ‘sit’. The most common subjects sitting were concrete concepts, of the semantic typesvehicle,device,document; most common locations were also concrete, of the typesfurnitureandarea, such as drive- ways or garages. Less common were buildings—which were never in neutrally- labelled utterances. That is to say, examples like(21)were rare.

(21) A ROCKY START. The house had been constructed by a mill worker from redwood hand-milled at the Mill Valley Lumber Co. There was no founda- tion –the house was sitting on rocks. The redwood was sound (redwood naturally repels predators) but the floors and stairs were creaky and the

kitchen was primitive. [COCA]

There were a handful of sentences without a locative prepositional phrase:

34 examples, (12% of 275). Note that the location was lacking only in evaluative uses and only with a secondary predicate,⁹regardless of verb form. Examples of secondary predicates are as in(22), where the boldfaced expressions are depictive predicates (a), and the underlined ones temporal expressions (b).

(22) a. “…In Pine Bluff, Arkansas,trailers sat rustingalongside tiny Depres- sion -era houses.” The picture Jargowski paints in his research is not

[9] Predicates that describe a “state or condition, or a role, function or life stage” holding at the same time as main predicate’s eventuality (Schultze-Berndt & Himmelmann 2004, p. 64).

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pretty. [COCA]

b. His attorney filed a motion to revise the sentence {of 15 years in prison for manslaughter} but the request sat for nearly eight years until the sentencing judge acted upon it. [COCA]

In these examples, the subject’s location is not explicitly expressed in the clause containing ‘sit’. Instead, a depictive predicate (rusting) follows the verb in (a), and a temporal for-phrase in (b); both of these are secondary predicates. Both sentences also include an extra layer of evaluative meaning, in that the subject’s idleness is considered undesired by somebody within the context: in (a), the state of the trailers is undesirable, and in (b) the speaker implies that the request being idle for so long is considered undesirable These, and the 32 other sentences of the without-locationsubset were categorised asevaluative.

Looking at secondary predicates in the entire data set: 60% of the simple past forms included a secondary predicate, whereas only 17% of the -ing forms did.

This suggests that the meaning encoded by the progressive (e.g., ‘transiency’) is a requirement of non-literal, locative ‘sit’, and that the secondary predicate can provide the necessary transiency meaning when there is no progressive morphology. The sentences in(23)are examples of the simple past form with secondary predicates and alocationargument.

(23) a. On the bridge […] a truck sat jammed nose-down through a huge hole in the middle of the concrete, its rear-end jutting out like the

monster of the blue lagoon. [COCA]

b. Instead, their plane sat for six hours on the tarmac, and the two slept

on the floor Wednesday night. [COCA]

Looking at the evaluative utterances in the entire data set: 60% of all examples were accompanied by an evaluation; 63% of the -ingexamples were evaluative and 51% of the simple past. As such, the answer to the second research question is that non-literal, locative ‘sit’ is often but not exclusively evaluative.

Interestingly, 94% of the subset simple past plus secondary predicate(regardless of whether it has a location argument) were evaluative. This is in contrast to only 26% of the -ingplus secondary predicate subset. This information, plus the without-location subset again suggest that the secondary predicate takes over when there is no progressive morphology.

To summarise the corpus study: the subset included various types of subjects, only permanent-type buildings were less frequent; the location argument can be omitted, but only when a secondary predicate is present; secondary predicates also overwhelmingly lead to evaluation in simple past forms. The next section will explore the role of a secondary predicate and how it relates to the progressive. In addition, the next section will discuss whether either might be the source of the

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evaluative component often accompanying non-literal, locative ‘sit’.

[4] d i s c u s s i o n

This final section will look at the theory behind secondary predicates and the progressive and will consider and then reject the notion that aspectual coercion is the source of an evaluation.

[4.1] Secondary predicates and the progressive

FollowingSchultze-Berndt & Himmelmann(2004) andRothstein(2000), I assume that secondary predicates contextualise the aspect of the main event. In the corpus examples in(24), the subjects’ current state is expressed by the depictive predicates,unattended(a) andrusting(b). This describes an eventuality holding true at the same time as the main predicate,sat.

(24) a. …the neighborhood is teeming with kids. […] But over the weekend, the street was strangely silent. Atricycle satunattended, across the street from a colourful chalk drawing of a young girl. [COCA]

b. “…In Pine Bluff, Arkansas,trailers satrusting alongside tiny Depres- sion era houses.” The picture Jargowski paints in his research is not

pretty. [COCA]

We know that (i) secondary predicates spatially bind the main verb and (ii) the 34 corpus examples without a location included a secondary predicate. Based on this, I propose that non-literal ‘sit’ requires spatial contextualisation.

Additionally, 60% of the simple past forms included a secondary predicate, a big difference from the 17% of the progressive ones. Following, e.g., Comrie (1976), I assume that the progressive aspect reports an event as being within a larger temporal frame. Also considering that secondary predicates temporally contextualise the main event’s time—in addition to the uncontroversial idea that a temporalfor-expression explicitly constrains the main event’s time—I propose that non-literal ‘sit’ requires both spatial and temporal contextualisation.

[4.2] The source of the evaluative component

Although not all of the corpus examples were judged to be evaluative by the native speaker annotator, more than half were. The cognitive literature (Newman 2002;

Lemmens 2002, e.g.) often ascribes negative associations to a posture verb like

‘lie’ and positive ones to ‘stand’. Sometimes, ‘sit’ is associated with concepts like being stuck or precarious, but it is only a tendency. Because of this ambivalence, I hesitate to pinpoint the social-cultural associations of ‘sit’ as being the source of the evaluation. Another possibility is aspectual coercion (to be distinguished from the coercion from literal to non-literal meaning).

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Cross-linguistically, the progressive is often known to carry an evaluative meaning. In English it can be used to describe a a contingent state (Comrie 1976). In Breton the interpretation is that an agent is intentionally doing something eval- uated as bad (Hewitt 1986). In languages such as Dutch and Afrikaans (Lemmens 2005;Breed 2017;Fraser & Pots 2018, a.o.) the posture verb in a verb cluster can carry an evaluation. The examples below illustrate.

(25) I’ve only had six whiskies and already I’m seeingpink elephants.

(Comrie 1976, p.37)

(26) Me

Me a⁼ temp

gav find

din to.me

’mañ is

ar the

maer mayor

o prog

lared say

gewier lies

I think the mayor isdeliberatelytelling lies (and I think this is bad).

(breton;Hewitt 1986, 67) (27) Het

The enige only

nadeel downside

met with

ziggo Ziggo

digitaal Digitaal

is is

live live

voetbal, football,

de the

hele entire buurt

neighbourhood

loopt te juichen walks to cheer

en and

hier here

valt falls

de the

goal goal

30 30

seconde seconds

later later

‘The only downside about Ziggo Digitaal¹⁰is watching live football; the entire neighbourhood is cheering, only at home the goal is made 30 seconds later.’ (lit. ‘the entire neighbourhoodwalksto cheer’)

[Dutch, twitter.com; example fromFraser & Pots 2018]

Also, the English progressive is often considered to involve a hidden coercion operator (de Swart 1998;Michealis 2004). That is, when the input is a state, the operator “adapts” it to be compatible, i.e., the state is transformed into a dynamic entity; according to de Swart (2008: 20), the output is still a state, but “more dynamic than the underlying state”. However, ‘sit’ can be used in a neutral, locative way, so this is not a good enough motivation to say that the evaluation’s source is solely the state-dynamic coercion. Additionally, the secondary predicates ar- guably do not coerce anything in this construction. It is possible to say that the lexical semantics of a depictive predicate likeforlornlyin(28)carries an evaluative meaning; the temporalfor-expressions only delineate a temporal interval.

(28) [She] pauses just long enough to admire her latest pet project: an enorm- ous electronic sign that blares STEER CLEAR OF SHELL-BOYCOTT NOW at a Shell service station sittingforlornlyacross the road. [COCA]

If it is not aspectual coercion, what might be triggering an evaluation? Data from a corpus study of Dutch and Afrikaans suggest that degree of grammaticalisation

[10] Ziggo Digitaal is a type of TV contract in the Netherlands.

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is connected to evaluative content (Fraser & Pots 2018). That is, in Dutch and Afrikaans, the three core posture verbs and the motion verb ‘walk’ can be used as progressive markers. The more grammaticalised the progressive marker is (determined by factors such as frequency of appearance with an animate subject and degree of semantic bleaching of the marker), the more often the utterance is likely to be considered as evaluative. In the English construction of the present paper, the posture verb ‘sit’ is semantically bleached to the extent that posture is not encoded at all, only location. While this parallel does not provide a clear answer to the question of an evaluation trigger, it shows that ‘sit’ belongs to a class of verbs which are capable of grammaticalising to the point of losing their original posture meaning, and when this happens, an evaluation is likely to accompany the utterance. Future work will have to be dedicated to pinpointing why it is these verbs that are participating and whether there is any more specific trigger for the evaluation.

[5] c o n c l u s i o n

This paper looked in detail at the lexically ambiguous English posture verb ‘sit’.

It described how this verb describes, in its literal sense, an animate subject at rest in a compact position with a vertical upper half. When the subject is inanimate, the meaning is reinterpreted and posture is no longer encoded. Instead, the location of the subject in an idle state is described. As such, the non-literal sense requires alocationargument, whereas the literal sense does not. A qualitative corpus study also found that thelocationargument can be fulfilled by a spatially-contextualising secondary predicate. Additionally, non-literal ‘sit’ must be temporally bounded, either by the progressive aspect or a secondary predicate.

Unlike two other core posture verbs, non-literal ‘sit’ does not encode a posture orientation in its metaphorical extension; it is therefore more productive than

‘stand’/‘lie’. Finally, the corpus study showed that an evaluative component is often, but not always, present in the non-literal ‘sit’ utterances. Being a case study, this paper had a narrow focus, concentrating on just one verb of just one class.

That being said, this study still has implications for other polysemous verbs, even outside of the posture verb class.

Next steps will be looking more closely at the transient meaning and the evaluation. More specifically, it will be interesting to see whether the transiency is entailed or a presupposition (cp. aspectual particles). The evaluation’s meaning will also be investigated and finally accounted for in a multi-dimensional model (e.g.,Gutzmann 2015).

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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Thanks to editor Alexandra Spalek and the anonymous reviewer, Elena Castro- viejo, Berit Gehrke, Agustín Vicente, and the audience at CoPo2017 for helpful comments. The author gratefully acknowledges the predoctoral grant BES-2016- 076783 (Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness, MINECO), project FFI2015-66732-P, (MINECO and FEDER), the IT769-13 Research Group (Basque Government), and UFI11/14 (UPV/EHU).

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Dowty, David. 1979. Word meaning and montague grammar. Reitel: Dordrecht.

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An empirical comparison of Dutch and Afrikaans. Unpublished ms. U. of the Basque Country & KU Leuven.

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