A Type Composition Logic for Generative Lexicon

Recent work in discourse semantics has focused on modeling the determinants of meaning for linguistic utterances beyond the level of a single clause. As more parameters of interpretation have been incorporated into our model of meaning, the assumption sregarding compositionality have become much more complex (cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1990; Kamp and Reyle 1993; Asher 1993; Asher and Lascarides 2003). Similarly, at the level of the clause, richer notions of composition and lexical structure have surfaced to explain the systematic variation in meaning involved in polysemies and polymorphisms (cf. Nunberg 1995; Moravcsik 1975; Pustejovsky 1995; Copestake and Briscoe 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This tradition in lexical semantics argues that we need a notion of composition for which, combining the meanings of two words may result in a change to those meanings themselves. We concentrate here on one problem in particular, that of copredication, where apparently incompatible types of predicates are applied to a single type of object. As argued in Nunberg (1995), Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993), and Copestake and Briscoe (1995), to handle such cases some context-sensitive notion of composition is needed, which is not what one finds in the standard theory of