I am developing a construction-based model of聽coercion, an interpretive adjustment that people perform when there is conflict between the meaning of a word and the meaning of the grammatical pattern in which that word appears. A simple example from the domain of verbs occurs when an event-selecting adverb like聽suddenly聽is combined with a state verb like聽办苍辞飞.听When we hear聽a nonce production like聽Suddenly, she knew it, we are able to construct a 'compromise construal' in which聽knew it聽means 'came to know it'. My research on coercion focuses on how context can change the combinatoric requirements of verbs (argument structure) and what kind of event or state a verb denotes (aspect). In my 2001 monograph with聽, I use this framework to model innovative uses of the German applicative (be-) construction.I have recently begun exploring coercion from a neuroscience perspective, learning from researchers in CU's聽. I am working with former CU LING doctoral student Les Sikos, whom I co-advised with CU Psychology professor聽, to design ERP-based studies of the neural processes used to resolve coercion effects. We are particularly interested in observing the聽 temporally dynamic patterns of recruitment of left versus right hemispheres during imaginative-language processing. We plan to explore the twin hypotheses that (a) the right hemisphere is engaged during the processing of imaginative language and (b) the degree of right-hemisphere involvement is affected by word and/or construction frequency. The basic intuition behind these hypotheses is that coerced tokens like聽a beer听补苍诲聽some newspaper聽are so entrenched as to be indistinguishable from noncoeced tokens like聽a glass听补苍诲聽some water, while nonstandard tokens like聽a ketchup 补苍诲听some pillow, even when appropriately contextualized, occasion some pondering. We believe that the studies we are designing are the first to combine ERP techniques and corpus analysis in the exploration of聽imaginative-language processing.