Lecture by Prof. Ofra Magidor |

At Tel Aviv University
Gilman Building, Hall 449

In Linguistics it is standard to distinguish between two types of ambiguity: homonymy, where (roughly) a term has two completely unrelated senses (e.g. ‘ball’ as used for a spherical play object, and ‘ball’ as used for a party); and polysemy, where (roughly) a word has two closely related senses (e.g. ‘lunch’ as used for used for a an event taking place midday and for a portion of food eaten at midday). The literature on polysemy reports a wide-range of alleged observations regarding the concept based on both straightforward intuitions of theorists, as well as experimental data on wide-scale speaker judgements and psychological processing.

In this talk (based on joint work with David Liebesman), we argue that many of these observations implicitly presuppose some theoretical assumptions about the phenomenon of copredication (sentences such as ‘Lunch was delicious, but took hours’). Indeed, they implicitly rely on false theoretical assumptions. After explaining what copredication is and our own preferred theoretical account of the phenomenon, we return to show how all this bears on the range of linguistic observations about polysemy.

Founded in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. The Colloquium acknowledges the support of The Cohn
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas (Tel Aviv University); The Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology,
and Medicine (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem); The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; The Yehoshua Bar-Hillel Fund.

Participants

Prof. Ofra Magidor, University of Oxford