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<Paper uid="C94-2112">
  <Title>On the Proper Role of Coercion in Semantic Typing</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recently, work in computational semantics and lexical semantics has made an interesting shift.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Motivated by a concern for lexical organization and global coherence in tl~e structure of the language lexicon, some researchers ha,w~ moved towards more expressive semantic descriptions (\[16, 1, 5, 101), as well a.s more powerful methods of composition (\[22, 3\]).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Some, however, have expressed reservations a.s to the general applicability of type-changing operations such as coercion, as well as the notion of a generative lexicon itself (\[7\]). In this pa.per, we address these c.riticisms directly, and show that, upon closer examination of the data, these critiques either miss the. point or are not substan tiated by the data. Still, without a proper notion of constraints on coercion, there can indeed be overgeneration of forms a.nd interpretations in the semantics, and in fact, the notion of conditions on coercion has always been integral to the basic spirit of Generative Lexicon Theory (el'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> \[19\]). The empirical study of the range and limits of type change and cocomposition operations in natural language is an essentia.l part of the research in formal smnantics. The advantages accompanying gelmrative mechanisnls and the characterization of languages as lmlymorphic in well-defined ways far outweight the explanatory inadequacies inherent in traditional approaches to lexical design and semantic projection, what \[22\] have called word sense enumeration approaches.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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