copredication

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From co- +‎ predication.

Noun

Examples

In (1), lunch is used both as an event with a duration, and a physical object with a taste. In (2), book is used both to mean the knowledge contained in the book, and a physical object that can be burned.

  1. Lunch was delicious but lasted hours.
  2. I memorized then burned the book.

copredication (countable and uncountable, plural copredications)

  1. (linguistics, semantics) The simultaneous application of multiple predicates to a single argument, each selecting a distinct and normally incompatible facet of its meaning.
    • 2011, Nicholas Asher, Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 11:
      Consider, for instance, lunches. Lunches can be events but they are also meals and as such physical objects. As a result, lunch supports felicitous copredications in which one predicate selects for the event sense of lunch while the other selects for the physical object or meal sense.
    • 2025, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Robin Cooper, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Peter R. Sutton, Types and the Structure of Meaning: Issues in Compositional and Lexical Semantics (Elements in Semantics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 34:
      Furthermore, the naturalness of copredication gives us another means of separating polysemy from lexical ambiguity, since polysemous expressions usually license copredication across different senses, but lexically ambiguous nouns do not (Asher, 2011). For instance, the lexically ambiguous noun party gives rise to zeugmatic effects when we attempt to copredicate across its senses.

Anagrams

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