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Intra‐sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy ⋆
Author(s) -
Lapata Mirella,
Keller Frank,
Scheepers Christoph
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1207/s15516709cog2704_4
Subject(s) - metonymy , interpretation (philosophy) , linguistics , context (archaeology) , subject (documents) , lexicon , generative grammar , verb , semantics (computer science) , computer science , computational linguistics , natural language processing , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , history , metaphor , archaeology , library science , programming language
Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading . Theoreticalwork [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.