Language is a marvelous web that allows us to assign different meanings to a single word. This process, known as ‘copredication,’ is like having one plate of food that is both delayed and filling at the same time. It’s mind-boggling! Understanding copredication is vital for unraveling the mysteries of how our brain organizes language and connects different concepts. By conducting experiments and analyzing acceptability judgments, researchers have discovered intriguing patterns that hold true across various types of words, sentence structures, and even different languages! These findings form the foundation for investigating copredication and shed light on its limitations. Recently, Löhr and Michel proposed a model suggesting that copredication acceptability is influenced by prior expectations and background knowledge. However, upon closer examination, their model encounters several challenges, unintentionally supporting a different perspective put forth by Murphy. If you’re curious about this captivating subject, I highly encourage you to explore Murphy’s extensive research on copredication!

Abstract
Human language affords the ability to attribute semantically distinct concepts to a single nominal, a process now commonly termed ‘copredication’. If we describe a lunch as being delayed but also filling , senses of distinct semantic categories (event, physical object) are simultaneously being accessed. Copredication is relevant to major debates in cognitive science, since it cuts to the core of how the lexicon is formatted, and how distinct lexico-semantic representations relate to each other. The apparent scope and limits of copredication licensing can be explored via acceptability judgment and processing experiments, exposing certain replicable and generalizable patterns that apply across lexical types, syntactic structures, and different languages (Murphy 2021a, 2021b). As such, laying out the psycholinguistic terrain in which to address this phenomenon is crucial – and accounts that lack a valid psycholinguistic and empirical basis should be highlighted as problematic if they are to be accommodated and refined. Löhr and Michel (2022) claim that copredication acceptability is determined by a “set of expectations that are influenced by higher-order priors associated with discourse context and world knowledge”. I will show that their model encounters a number of obstacles, and ends up unintentionally supporting an alternative model in Murphy (2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c), which they attempt to critique.

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