Coercion and Construction Grammar

Coercion is a long-discussed issue in linguistics and its mechanisms have been imaged differently. This article tries to introduce the theoretician's views about the nature of coercion and analyzes this phenomenon in some morphological and syntactic Persian colloquial data. It is supposed that this analysis will elucidate some points in Persian morphology and syntax.
This study relies on the framework proposed by Audring and Booij (2016). According to this approach we will expound three coercion mechanisms or effects: selection, enrichment and override. In coercion by selection, the resulting meaning is a part of the semantic repertoire of the coerced word to begin with. From this perspective, coercion works largely ‘bottom-up’, with only a light role for the context selecting one interpretation from the range of alternative readings. In coercion by enrichment, lexical semantics is preserved, but augmented in context. It represents a stronger ‘top-down’ influence, adding meaning to the utterance. In coercion by override, in turn, contextual ‘top-down’ force is strongest; it modifies, replaces, or removes properties of the coerced item. The current research is presented within the framework of Construntion Grammar. The data is based on the the analysis of modern Persian colloquial data drawn from the oral data, including radio and television programs and the researcher's interactions with others and also Google Persian sites sentences.
The data analyzed showed that we can put all three above mentioned mechanisms along a single axis, considering the degree of top-down influence of complex morphological and syntactic constructions on the lexical semantics or category of the unified element. Idiomatic constructions are the most radical coercion of the override type. The present study shows the applicability of the approach in Persian data analysis. Moreover, it shows that coercion can support the notion of 'construction' and subsequently the Construction Grammar. Using coercion besides construction, this study presents a new analysis for making not only words basad on possible words but also the so-called fake infinitives.