Restrictions on copredication: a situation theoretic approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a situation-theoretic account of polysemy: polysemous nouns denote situations that witness (i.e. contain) multiple entities of different types. For instance, lunch denotes situations that contain an eating event and some food where these stand in a patient relation. A puzzle regarding more than two ways polysemous nouns such as statement is the restrictions on copredication they exhibit, namely, where multiple, potentially incompatible predicates are applied based on a single antecedent, but not all combinations of readings are possible. Such restrictions fall naturally out of the situation-theoretic account of polysemy.