Processing events: Behavioral and neuromagnetic correlates of Aspectual Coercion Jonathan Brennan a, * , Liina Pylkkänen a,b a Department of Linguistics, New York University, 726 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA b Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA article info Article history: Accepted 25 April 2008 Available online 17 June 2008 Keywords: Semantic composition Aspectual Coercion MEG AMF abstract Much recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic work has aimed to elucidate the mechanisms by which sen- tence meanings are composed by investigating the processing of semantic mismatch. One controversial case for theories of semantic composition is expressions such as the clown jumped for ten minutes, in which the aspectual properties of a punctual verb clash with those of a durative modifier. Such sentences have been proposed to involve a coercion operation which shifts the punctual meaning of the verb to an iterative one. However, processing studies addressing this hypothesis have yielded mixed results. In this study, we tested four hypotheses of how aspectual mismatch is resolved with self-paced reading and magnetoencephalography. Using a set of verbs normed for punctuality, we identified an immediate behavioral cost of mismatch. The neural correlates of this processing were found to match effects in mid- line prefrontal regions previously implicated in the resolution of complement coercion. We also identified earlier effects in right-lateral frontal and temporal sites. We suggest that of the representational hypoth- eses currently in the literature, these data are most consistent with an account where aspectual mis- match initially involves the composition of an anomalous meaning that is later repaired via coercion. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Humans’ ability to understand and produce previously unen- countered expressions tells us that semantic interpretation must be by and large compositional, that is, the meanings of expressions are a function of their parts and the way the parts are syntactically combined. While the general idea of compositionality is largely uncontroversial, the computational mechanisms by which it is achieved remain poorly understood for a number of constructions. One particularly controversial case involves expressions such as the clown jumped for ten minutes, where there is no word which encodes the information, obvious to any healthy native speaker, that the clown jumped several times (Talmy, 1978). In this work, we used a combination of behavioral and neuromagnetic measures to eluci- date the representation and processing of this type of expression. At least four different hypotheses have been proposed about the representation of expressions such as the clown jumped for ten min- utes. One common approach is to introduce an unpronounced rule, corresponding to no overt syntactic element, which encodes the repetitive aspect of the verb’s meaning. The rule is invoked in response to the aspectual mismatch between the temporal modifier for ten minutes, which describes duration of time, and the verb jumped, which appears to describe a near-instantaneous, punctual event. Pustejovsky (1991) dubbed the resolution of this mismatch Aspectual Coercion, adopting terminology introduced by Moens and Steedman (1988). The general idea of Aspectual Coercion can be implemented in several ways. In some theories it is a semantic operation which ap- plies within the compositional system in order to resolve the aspectual mismatch between the punctual verb and the durative adverb (De Swart, 1998; Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995; Smith, 1991). In these theories the aspectual properties of the verb and the adverb are encoded in the lexical meanings of these elements in such as way that composition is impossible without some type of meaning shift. This type of analysis can be contrasted with a pragmatic approach, where the verb and the adverb successfully compose in the semantics but create an ano- malous meaning (such as ‘the clown performed a ten-minute long jump’). This anomalous meaning is then shifted to a repetitive meaning pragmatically (cf., Dölling, 1995, 1997, 2003a, 2003b). A core property of both of these approaches is that the punctual meaning of the verb is primitive and the iterative meaning derived. A third proposal of aspectual mismatch resolution has coercion applying in the opposite direction. In this account, verbs such as jump are represented as repetitive activities which coerce into punc- tual events in punctual contexts (e.g., at 3 o’clock, the clown jumped) (Rothstein, 2004). We will call this approach Punctual Coercion, to be distinguished from the approach described above, henceforth Itera- tive Coercion. Finally, all of these three coercion theories contrast with an ap- proach that essentially denies the existence of Aspectual Coercion as any type of interpretive operation. Instead, verbs like jump are 0093-934X/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.04.003 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: jon.brennan@nyu.edu (J. Brennan). Brain & Language 106 (2008) 132–143 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Brain & Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l