Restrictions on copredication: a situation theoretic approach

Abstract

Comunicació presentada a la 32nd Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, celebrada del 8 al 10 de juny de 2022 de manera virtual.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 provided.This research was supported by the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowships programme, funded by the Secretary of Universities and research (Government of Catalonia) and from the Horizon 2020 programme of research and innovation of the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 801370