In this paper, I examine the behavior of several classes of lexical
items exhibiting various degrees of systematic or logical
polysemy. These words present an interesting challenge to conventional
treatments of polysemy in natural language semantics. Extending the
analysis of these classes presented in Pustejovsky (1994,1995), I
elaborate the formal mechanisms responisible for capturing the
syntactic and semantic behavior of nouns such as lecture,
prize, book, and lunch, and verbs such as read,
rent, and break. I argue that members of these classes
must be represented as complex types, as they do not allow for
simple conjunctive typing; furthermore, these nouns and verbs display
a peculiar behavior regarding the quantificational force of the type
which is
absent from other nominal and verbal classes.
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