Intra-sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy

• Published in: Cognitive science Vol. 27; no. 4; pp. 649 - 668
• Main Authors: Lapata, Mirella, Keller, Frank, Scheepers, Christoph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Colchester Elsevier Inc 01.07.2003; Taylor & Francis; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Bayesian modeling; Coercion; Cognition & reasoning; Context; Corpus-based modeling; Generative lexicon; Linguistics; Logical metonymy; Production and comprehension processes; Psycholinguistics; Psychology of language; Sentence completion; Context; Generative lexicon; Corpus-based modeling; Bayesian modeling; Logical metonymy; Sentence completion; Coercion; Grammatical subject; Language comprehension; Cognitive process; Verb; Linguistic context; Semantic interpretation; Metonymy; Completion test; Influence; Psycholinguistics; Modelling; Semantic role
• ISSN: 0364-0213; 1551-6709
• DOI: 10.1016/S0364-0213(03)00035-1

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoretical work [Computational Linguistics 17 (4) (1991) 409; The Generative Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995] predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra-sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data.