Copredication, Counting, and Criteria of Individuation: A Response to Gotham

Abstract

Copredication is the phenomenon exhibited by sentences such as (1)-(3): ... This problem has driven theorists to a variety of dramatic conclusions, most notably that referential semantics should be jettisoned altogether (Chomsky, 2000; Pietroski, 2005; Collins, 2009, 2011 and forthcoming). Those who are moved by the puzzle but wish to preserve referential semantics have offered a range of complex semantic theories (Pustejovky, 1995; Luo, 2012; Asher, 2011; Gotham, 2017). The details of these views vary considerably, but they share the common general idea: nouns involved in copredication (such as ‘book’) belong to a kind of complex semantic type (in this case, a type which in some manner combines being physical and being informational), and which (perhaps after some further syntactic and semantic footwork) allows the two conflicting properties or modifiers (‘heavy’ and ‘informative’ in this case), to apply.