Intra-sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy

Lapata, M., Keller, F. and Scheepers, C. (2003) Intra-sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy. Cognitive Science(27), pp. 649-668.

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Abstract

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoretical work (Pustejovsky 1991, 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.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Scheepers, Dr Christoph
Authors: Lapata, M., Keller, F., and Scheepers, C.
College/School:College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience
College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology
Journal Name:Cognitive Science

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