Copredication, polysemy and context-sensitivity

Abstract

Copredication, as exhibited by sentences such as 'That book is heavy but informative,' is commonly seen as a phenomenon that is tied to sentences featuring polysemous expressions. David Liebesman and Ofra Magidor have recently attacked this view by arguing that 'book' has a single contextsensitive sense. The first aim of the present paper is to show that Liebesman and Magidor are wrong to claim that 'book' is univocal, but that they may nonetheless be right to question that copredication requires polysemy. Its second aim is to consider implications of this result for the debates on copredication and on semantic variability.

Mental simulation and language comprehension: The case of copredication

“…Each of these accounts nevertheless faces criticism (see Liebesman & Magidor, 2019; Ortega‐Andrés, 2022; Vicente, 2021b; Viebahn, 2022). It may be that proponents of these ontological accounts can address the respective objections.…”

Copredication, Davidson and Logical Form

“…(2) That book is heavy but informative (Viebahn, 2022(Viebahn, , p. 1066), (3) Lunch was delicious, but went on forever (Asher, 2011, p. 11), (4) The school that caught fire was celebrating 4th of July when the fire started (Ortega-Andrés and Vicente, 2019, p. 2).…”

Pragmatic enrichment, issues and domain goals

“…However, the sort of predicate underspecification at play in Travis cases seems quite different in this respect to such systematic "sense alternations" 10 insofar as many candidate semantic values remain even when the linguistic context of the target term is provided. For instance, green leaves, round ball, hot oven, blue ink and informative book each still has many different possible interpretations that may bring about the variability in intuitive truth-conditions of the sentences of which they are a part (see also Viebahn, 2020). So, while a simple modification will typically disambiguate "senses" it need not, thereby, disambiguate ways.…”

“…Some authors do not find a significant distinction between the underspecification of green or philosopher in Travis cases and the underspecification of polysemous expressions such as book or school (Carston, 2010; Löhr, 2021; Recanati, 2012; Vicente, 2015). This is not surprising because both “permit an expression to have different semantic values on different uses” (Viebahn, 2020, p. 4). Thus, using the polysemy of book as the model, Vicente (2015) proposes an analysis of the green leaves case by appealing to two general “aspects” (qualia) associated with common nouns: object‐as‐it‐is and object‐as‐it‐appears .…”

“…Pustejovsky lists several sense alternations (content/container, count/mass, figure/ground, product/producer, process/ result and place/people) associated with what he calls "logical polysemy"(Pustejovsky, 1995, p. 31). 11 According toViebahn (2020), besides mere polysemy, there is a category of polysemy cum context-sensitivity whereby each sense may further have many different semantic values. DOBLER…”