Formal Semantics in Modern Type Theories

5Copredication and Individuation

Copredication (Pustejovsky 1995) is the phenomenon where more than one predicate (verb or adjective) that require different types of arguments are used in coordination and applied to the “same” common noun (CN) argument:

(5.1) John picked up and mastered the book.

Individuation, on the other hand, is the process by which objects in a particular collection are distinguished from one another. Individuation provides us with the means that enables us to count individual objects, e.g. cats, dogs or any other type of object, and differentiate among them. At the same time, individuation also provides one with an identity criterion (IC), i.e. a way to decide whether two members of a particular collection are the same or not. Copredication interacts with individuation in a number of interesting and challenging ways. Most specifically, copredication, when combined with quantification, provides compelling examples supporting the idea that CN have their own ICs. The idea of CNs involving their own ICs was first discussed by Geach (1962) and was further studied later on by other researchers including, for example, the second author (Luo 2012a) on the CNs-as-types paradigm within the semantic framework based on MTTs.

In this chapter, we study copredication and individuation in MTT-semantics. In section 5.1, some introductory explanations on copredication and its interaction with quantification are given, where we also illustrate why a formal treatment of ...