Logical Metonymy in a Distributional Model of Sentence Comprehension
Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci, Philippe Blache · 2017
In theoretical linguistics, logical metonymy is defined as the combination of an event-subcategorizing verb with an entity-denoting direct object (e.g., The author began the book), so that the interpretation of the VP requires the retrieval of a covert event (e.g., writing).Psycholinguistic studies have revealed extra processing costs for logical metonymy, a phenomenon generally explained with the introduction of new semantic structure.In this paper, we present a general distributional model for sentence comprehension inspired by the Memory, Unification and Control model by Hagoort (2013Hagoort ( , 2016)).We show that our distributional framework can account for the extra processing costs of logical metonymy and can identify the covert event in a classification task.