Approaches to co-predication: Inherent polysemy and metaphysical relations

There is a growing interest in the phenomenon of co-predication, where a single NP appears with predicates that have incompatible selectional preferences. The phenomenon suggests that a single NP can stand for at least two entities and so that the truth-conditions of a co-predicative sentence are more complicated than what the surface structure indicates. In this paper, two different kinds of proposals concerning this issue are presented and discussed: conservative approaches that commit to there being just one entity that is referred by a co-predicative term; and non-conservative, but more intuitive approaches, that assign conjunctions of simple truth-conditional contents to co-predicative sentences. Meanwhile, it is argued that, although much is still unknown about co-predication, many approaches coincide in signalling that the different senses of the terms that co-predicate in a stable way are linked by particular metaphysical relations. •Offers a review of proposals concerning co-predication.•Introduces a novel distinction: conservative vs non-conservative approaches.•Introduces novel arguments and pieces of evidence.•Discovers coincidences in very different approaches to the phenomenon.•It serves as an update on the literature.