Word.ws English Dictionary

copredication

copredication noun: the simultaneous application of multiple predicates to a single argument, each selecting a distinct and normally incompatible facet of its meaning.

Noun

copredication (countable and uncountable, plural copredications)

  1. The simultaneous application of multiple predicates to a single argument, each selecting a distinct and normally incompatible facet of its meaning.
    • Consider, for instance, lunches. Lunches can be events but they are also meals and as such physical objects. As a result, lunch supports felicitous copredications in which one predicate selects for the event sense of lunch while the other selects for the physical object or meal sense.2011, Nicholas Asher, Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 11
    • Furthermore, the naturalness of copredication gives us another means of separating polysemy from lexical ambiguity, since polysemous expressions usually license copredication across different senses, but lexically ambiguous nouns do not (Asher, 2011). For instance, the lexically ambiguous noun...2025, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Robin Cooper, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Peter R. Sutton, Types and the Structure of Meaning: Issues in Compositional and Lexical Semantics (Elements in Semantics)...

Forms of copredication

pluralcopredications
alternative formco-predication

Origin of copredication

From co- + predication.

Questions about copredication

What does copredication mean?
Copredication means the simultaneous application of multiple predicates to a single argument, each selecting a distinct and normally incompatible facet of its meaning.
What part of speech is copredication?
Copredication is a noun.
What is the plural of copredication?
The plural of copredication is copredications.

Words near copredication in the dictionary

  1. coprecipitated
  2. coprecipitates
  3. coprecipitating
  4. coprecipitation
  5. coprecipitations
  6. copredication
  7. copredications
  8. copremesis
  9. copremia
  10. copremic
  11. coprescribe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: copredication (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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