Cococorpus: a corpus of copredication (2025)

Abstract: While copredication has been widely investigated as a linguistic phenomenon, there is a notable lack of systematically annotated data to support empirical and quantitative research. This paper gives an overview of the ongoing construction of Cococorpus, a corpus of copredication, describes the annotation methodology and guidelines, and presents preliminary findings from the annotated data. Currently, the corpus contains 1500 gold-standard manual annotations including about 200 sentences with copredications. The annotated data not only supports the empirical validation for existing theories of copredication, but also reveals regularities that may inform theoretical development.

## introduction inherently polysemous nouns have multiple meaning facets. for example, the noun 'breakfast' has an object facet referring to its food reading, and an event facet referring to its dining reading. it is common to analyze its semantic type as a "dot-type" food • event @xcite . different meaning facets of a dot-type noun can be predicated by multiple predicates at the same time. this phenomenon is referred to as copredication @xcite . in (1), the verb 'bring' targets the object facet while 'late' targets the event facet. 1 (1) go bring your new sister some late breakfast. coercion, by contrast, refers to the phenomenon where the predicate targets a facet which is not available in the noun. (2) is an example of coercion. the verb 'resist' targets an event facet, but 'novel' is an object • info noun without event facets. copredication has been studied extensively in linguistics. for example, a number of studies focus on the restrictions and the orders of copredication. @xcite observed an asymmetry in the copredication of the polysemous noun 'city'. @xcite noticed that football team reading of the polysemous noun 'liverpool' cannot copredicate with other readings. @xcite concluded that the copredication of 'newspaper' related to the organization reading is relatively restricted compared to its other facets. @xcite proposed the concept of 'activation package' to explain the possibility of the copredication over 'school @xcite discovered that the physical entity and eventuality reading of 'statement' cannot cooccur in a copredication construction, but either reading can copredicate with the informational content reading. @xcite claimed that complexity and coherence are the decisive factors for the predicate order within a copredication. @xcite further suggested that context is a more fundamental factor and explained the order of copredication with the notion of "expectation". @xcite proposed a distinction between 'primary facets' and 'secondary facets' to explain the asymmetry in the copredication of food • event nouns. however, most of these previous work is based on a small number of introspectively constructed sentences or cherry-picked typical cases, and there is little quantitative research on copredication to prove or disprove the proposed theories. also, previous work mainly focused on prototypical copredication instances, while a lot of borderline cases are not well-represented. these limitations show the need of an annotated corpus of sentences with copredication. currently there are few corpora related to copredication. @xcite created a lexicon with corpus usage patterns of words with semantic types information. however, the focus is on verbs instead of polysemous nouns and copredication constructions are not specifically addressed. @xcite annotated in total 4500 sentences from three languages containing regular polysemous nouns, but most of the sentences contain single predications instead of copredications, and copredication is only treated as a kind of underspecification. another valuable resource focusing on semantic types targeted by predicates is t-pas (typed predicate argument structures; @xcite . t-pas offers argument structure patterns for italian verbs, annotated with semantic types. it also provides corpus instances for each verb pattern. however, although t-pas includes a range of semantic types and is not limited to simple type nouns, instances involving dot-types are relatively infrequent, and the focus is on single-type predications. to our knowledge, no corpus to date has a specific focus on copredication. in this paper we describe the construction of cococorpus, an ongoing project that aims at a corpus with copredication and coercion annotations. the current version is restricted to english. up to now, we have mainly been targeting the annotation of copredication, covering three kinds of dot-types, and we have manually annotated about 1500 goldstandard sentences from bookcorpus @xcite where a polysemous noun is predicated by multiple predicates, including around 200 copredication sentences. cococorpus also contains around 18000 silver-standard sentences acquired through automatic annotation. ## annotation overview for our copredication annotation, we focused on three common dot-types in language: food • event, info • event, and object • info, which are related to the three major ontological categories phys(ical)obj(ect), information, and event. 2 these dot-types are selected because they are relatively betterstudied and their facets are rather easy to distinguish from each other. the annotation pipeline includes the following stages: ## conclusion and future work the construction of cococorpus is an ongoing project. currently, we achieved an annotation of more than 1000 sentences with multiple predications over inherently polysemous nouns, among which 198 sentences exhibit copredication. the annotated data can serve as an empirical evidence for some linguistic analyses on copredication, such as a tendency of isc from @xcite and the distinction between primary and secondary facets of polysemous nouns from @xcite . the annotated data and annotation guideline are published at the project github page ( https://github.com/cococo-project ). many aspects of copredication remain to be addressed in future annotation efforts. the current annotation framework is limited to the construction v+adj+n, while other typical copredication constructions, such as (reduced) relative clauses and multiple adjectives, are yet to be incorporated. furthermore, the existing coverage of dot-types and nouns is also relatively limited. we plan to expand our annotation scope to include: (1) additional dot-types and lexical items, particularly nouns exhibiting multiple facets (e.g., school, city) and those with debatable facet classifications (e.g., annotation); (2) a broader range of predicate types;