Types, meanings and co-composition in lexical semantics

International audienceThis paper investigates co-composition, the composition of a predicate and its arguments in which either the predicate, the arguments, or both shift their meaning. We study the implications of this phenomenon for type-theoretic approaches to semantics. We adduce evidence from distributional methods in lexical semantics that co-composition is widespread and then argue that a proper treatment leads to a reconsideration of the basics of type theory for natural language semantics