Valency coercion in Italian. An Exploratory Study

The paper investigates valency coercion effects in Italian by means of anacceptability rating task on nine argument structure constructions. Theexperimental design followsPerek & Hilpert (2014)in presenting threeconditions: grammatical, impossible and coercion stimuli. This designallows us to test several factors: the acceptability of creative coercedstructures, the role of age and– most importantly– the influence of theconstruction itself. Results overall confirm our hypotheses: valencycoercion is identified as an intermediate level between grammaticality andungrammaticality, with varying degrees of “coercibility” acrossconstructions. An influence of age is not in evidence for coercion sentences,suggesting that the systematic variation in acceptability is due to theinfluence of different constructions. We propose that coercion resolutionresults from the interaction of constructional and lexical semantics.