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Inherent polysemy, predicate transfer and co-predication

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Many word forms in natural language are polysemous, but only some of them allow for co-predication, that is, they allow for simultaneous predications selecting for two different meanings or senses of a nominal in a sentence. In this paper, we try to explain (i) why some groups of senses allow co-predication and others do not, and (ii) how we interpret co-predicative sentences. The paper focuses on those groups of senses that allow co-predication in an especially robust and stable way. We argue, using these cases, but focusing particularly on the multiply polysemous word 'school', that the senses involved in co-predication form especially robust activation packages, which allow hearers and readers to access all the different senses in interpretation.
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In one form or another, the phenomena associated with "meaning transfer" have become central issues in a lot of recent work on semantics. Speaking very roughly, we can partition approaches to the phenomenon along two dimensions, which yield four basic points of departure. In the first two, people have considered transfer in basically semantic or linguistic terms. Some have concentrated on what we might call the paradigmatic aspects of transfer, focusing on the productive lexical processes that map semantic features into features --- for example, the "grinding" rule that applies to turn the names of animals into mass terms denoting their meat or fur. This the approach that's involved in most recent work on "regular polysemy," "systematic polysemy," and the like, for example by Apresjan, Ostler and Atkins, Briscoe and Copestake, Nunberg and Zaenen, Wilensky, Kilgarriff and a number of other people. Other people have emphasized the syncategorematic aspects of transfer; that is, the ways meaning shifts and specifications are coerced in the course of semantic composition. This is an approach that hass been developed in particular by James Pustejovsky and his collaborators, building on earlier work on type shifting.
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This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.
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Apresjan, J. (1974). Regular Polysemy. Linguistics 142. 5-32.
Eddie would go. London: Yellow Jersey
  • S Coleman
Coleman, S. (2004). Eddie would go. London: Yellow Jersey.
Lexical facets and metonymy. Ilha do Desterro: A
  • D Cruse
Cruse, D. (2004). Lexical facets and metonymy. Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language (Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 47), 73-96.