Towards a linguistic definition of metonymy

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Marcella Bertuccelli and Prof. Alessandro Lenci, for their patience and support while I carried out the dicult and sometimes painful process of working on this dissertation. Their guidance has been invaluable in navigating the tricky emotional and intellectual waters of carrying out a research project. I would also like to thank them for contributing to this project with many good ideas and useful constructive criticism.

I would also like to thank Dr. Valentina Bambini for generously devoting some of her limited time to talking about metonymy with me. These conversa-tions have been illuminating and have provided me with a wide variety of useful perspectives for my study. The responsibility lies solely with me if I have only taken advantage of a small part of these perspectives.

Finally, I would like to wholeheartedly thank Prof. Chu-Ren Huang and all my colleagues and the administrative sta from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for providing a welcoming and supportive environment for my work and for giving me a wealth of observations and suggestions which I will use for years to come. I also thank all the organizers of the Erasmus Mundus MULTI grant and the European Union for making my stay in Hong Kong possible.

Special thanks go to Vincenzo, who helped me gure out countless technical issues and listened to me whenever I needed to untangle a particularly tricky line of reasoning. I owe a lot to his critical thinking skills.

All errors and oversights in this work remain, of course, my own.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

This work represents my attempt at developing a denition of metonymy as a linguistic phenomenon; I see it as a preliminary step to an in-depth corpus study of metonymy. Metonymy is traditionally dened as a rhetorical gure where the name of one entity is used to refer to another entity that is somehow connected to the rst, as in crown for authority or Proust for the works of Proust in a sentence like I like reading Proust. The concept of metonymy was rst developed within the context of ancient Classical rhetoric, and was classed among the embellishments of speech that could be used to make a text more aesthetically pleasing. However, metonymy is commonly used in everyday language as well as in literature. In fact, the examples I just quoted are considered normal uses of language and are not particularly poetic. In this work, I will focus on metonymy as a phenomenon that occurs in normal language use.

Up until the past two decades, metonymy has not received much attention in the linguistic literature. It was mentioned in some pre-structuralist works, such as Paul (1880); Waag (1901); Nyrop (1913); Esnault (1925) (see also Norrick, 1981). These works expressed a view of metonymy that was mostly in line with the traditional Classical notion: they presented catalogues of metonymies similar to the ones compiled by ancient scholars, listing metonymic relationships such as cause for eect, producer for product, part for whole, etc.

In 1980, however, George Lako and Mark Johnson (Lako and Johnson, 1980) proposed a new theory of metonymy which became extremely popular. According to this theory, metonymy was not primarily a linguistic phenomenon, but a cognitive phenomenon which did not just inuence language, but the way humans think in general. Lako and Johnson found evidence of metonymic thinking in many dierent elds of human thought, including art, social and cultural conventions, and the way in which we categorize our perceptions of the world (see Lako, 1987). In their view, metonymy did not involve a connection between two entities, but between two concepts. In order to create a metonymy, these concepts had to come from the same conceptual domain; this constraint dierentiated metonymy from metaphor, which was a mapping between concepts from dierent conceptual domains in Lako and Johnson's view.

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This idea of metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon was taken up by a very large number of scholars within the branch of linguistic studies called Cogni-tive Linguistics. The past two decades have seen an abundance of works on conceptual metonymy, many of them interesting and insightful. I have found, however, that the notion of conceptual metonymy itself has some serious aws, stemming mainly from the fact that the criteria proposed to dene it are too vague. They give rise to an extremely general notion of metonymy which in-cludes everything from the standard one name standing for another name examples of metonymy, to the relationship between a literary work and all the pragmatic implicatures than can derived from it, to non-linguistic examples such as the use of a character's body parts to represent the whole person in a lm scene (for the latter two cases, see Gibbs, 1994). This extremely vast category is based on an excessively inclusive view of metonymy which does not take the dierences between the phenomena it unites into account.

This work is in many ways a response to the cognitive linguistic approach to metonymy. It is an attempt to develop a rigorous denition of metonymy, built by taking into account the various subtle dierences between examples of metonymy that most works in Cognitive Linguistics seem to overlook. In this work, I will focus exclusively on metonymy as a linguistic phenomenon. By this, I am not trying to argue that metonymy does not have a conceptual compo-nent; the creation and interpretation of language take place in people's minds, and therefore naturally involve elements of conceptual processing. I am also not attempting to disprove the existence of conceptual metonymy altogether, although I will present some arguments against it in chapter 3. However, my main goal is simply to shift the focus of attention from conceptual metonymy back to linguistic metonymy.

My denition of metonymy is based on what I consider to be the three essen-tial aspects of this phenomenon: the linguistic phenomena typically associated with it, the relationship between the metonymically-used word and its linguis-tic and situational context, and the relationship between the entities that are involved in it. I ended up drawing on various dierent theoretical approaches to identify these dening aspects.

Briey, I found that the main linguistic phenomenon that is always asso-ciated with metonymy is reference shift: the metonymically-employed word is used to denote an entity that is dierent from its usual referent. This notion is drawn from the traditional literature on metonymy. As far as the relation-ship of the metonymically-employed word with its context is concerned, I found that metonymies can be divided into two categories: one category, which I will call type-shifting, involves a semantic mismatch between the metonymically-employed noun and its context. This mismatch triggers a semantic type shift within the noun itself. The second category, which I will call non-type-shifting, does not involve a semantic mismatch; instead, there is a gap in the informa-tion conveyed by the metonymically-used noun which speakers ll using knowl-edge about the world and about the situational context, in a process called free pragmatic enrichment. The notion of semantic type shift comes from for-mal semantic approaches to the study of language, most notably from

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Puste-jovsky (1995)'s Generative Lexicon, while the notion of free pragmatic enrich-ment comes from studies in lexical pragmatics such as Récanati (2012) and Carston (2010a). These two categories have fuzzy boundaries and are actually two extremes of a continuum; some instances of metonymy are prototypically type-shifting, some are prototypically non-type-shifting, but many are in the middle. I tried to represent what this continuum would look like in practice by organizing about 300 examples of metonymy taken from the literature along it, from the most prototypically type-shifting to the most prototypically non-type-shifting. Finally, I found that the best way to describe the relationship between the entities involved in metonymy is via the notion of conceptual contiguity, used in the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm: simply put, the entities need to be associated in the experience of the speaker producing the metonymy and his or her audience.

Along with this discussion on what makes metonymy possible, I will also make some considerations on what makes some metonymic types more frequent, i.e. more productive, than others. I will discuss a proposal put forth by Radden and Kövecses (2007), according to which the productivity of metonymies is motivated by principles of cognitive salience. An example of such a principle is human over non-human: according to this principle, people tend to think and speak of humans more often than they do of non-humans, because human entities are more cognitively salient for people. I will try to determine the extent to which these principles inuence metonymy by seeing whether they apply to the 300 examples of metonymy I extracted from the literature. My preliminary conclusions on the subject are that cognitive principles do inuence metonymy, to some extent, but in a way that is complex and non-harmonious.

The structure of this work is as follows. In chapter 2, I will conduct a wide-range review of the literature on metonymy, presenting the various denitions and mechanisms that have been proposed to account for it over time. In chap-ter 3, I will present my arguments against the cognitive linguistic notion of metonymy (section 3.2) and then begin to discuss my denition of metonymy by tackling the issues of reference shift and the continuum between type-shifting and non-type-shifting metonymies (section 3.3). In section 3.4, I will present a classication of metonymies based on 300 examples I extracted from the linguis-tic literature and I will show how those examples can be organized along the type shift/non-type-shift continuum. In chapter 4, I will discuss the relationship between the entities involved in metonymy (section 4.1) and I will then discuss the issue of what motivates the productivity of dierent metonymic types (sec-tion 4.2). In the nal chapter, I will present my conclusions and some possible directions for future research.

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Chapter 2

A review of the literature

on metonymy

2.1 Introduction

What follows is a partial review of the linguistic literature on metonymy. Since works on metonymy are quite abundant within certain approaches and it would have been impossible to review them all in this context, I have focused in partic-ular on theoretical approaches to metonymy whose goal is to provide an account of the processes underlying this phenomenon.

This review is structured as follows: in section 2.2, I will conduct a brief overview of the treatment of metonymy in classical rhetoric. Both the notion and the term designating metonymy have their origin in classical studies of rhetoric; this part of the literature is therefore essential in order to understand the basic notions on which linguistic studies have subsequently built in order to construct an account of metonymy. In section 2.3, I will review the formal approaches dedicated to metonymy; by formal approaches I mean all those studies whose account of linguistic phenomena is based on formal machinery usually drawn from predicate logic. section 2.4 is dedicated to the most important studies of metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics. Finally, section 2.5 is dedicated to the small number of pragmatic accounts of metonymy that can be found in the literature.

2.2 The rhetorical tradition

The notion of metonymy was rst developed and used in classical rhetoric. Rhetoric may be dened as the art of discourse (Quintilian, author of the In-stitutio oratoria, called it the art of speaking well, ars bene dicendi: Inst. or. 2.17.37). Its aim is to provide speakers with the tools for constructing an infor-mative, persuasive, or motivating discourse for particular audiences in specic situations. In the classical world, the main funtion of rhetoric was to train

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lic speakers to present their cases persuasively in a political or judicial context, such as speaking before an assembly or in court. As such, it was an important part of the education of men in the upper social classes.

Various manuals and treatises on rhetoric by classical authors are still avail-able to us, most notably Aristotle's Rhetoric (Τέχνη ῥητορική, ca. 330 BCE), the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 90 BCE), Cicero's De oratore (55 BCE), and Quintilian's Institutio oratoria (95 CE). The following brief overview of the classical treatment of metonymy is based on Lausberg's Handbook of lit-erary rhetoric (Lausberg, 1998), a vast compendium of these and other works from classical and medieval rhetoric. Along with the works quoted above, the rhetoric treatise Περὶ τρόπων, attributed to the author Tryphon (1st century BCE), is also mentioned by Lausberg as featuring a description of metonymy.

Aristotle did not use the term metonymy; however, he referred to phe-nomena resembling both metaphor and metonymy under the label of μεταφορά. In later classical works, metonymy is always presented as a phenomenon inde-pendent from metaphor, although both belong to the same class of rhetorical techniques.

In classical rhetoric, metonymy is mainly considered an embellishment of speech: it is one of the instruments that can be used by a speaker to achieve ornatus, or linguistic elegance. Ornatus is an important consideration during elocutio, the phase of the composition of a speech which involves its linguistic for-mulation. The ve steps of speech composition in classical rhetoric are inventio (nding ideas or topics to discuss), dispositio (putting them in a specic order), elocutio, memoria (committing to memory), and actio (public delivery). The purpose of the theory of elocutio is to help the speaker supply the linguistic garment [. . . ], the materialization, the incarnation of ideas (Lausberg, 1998, 215), and to do so in a way that is as close as possible to perfection. There are dierent requirements (dened as virtues virtutes of the speech) that must be met for this to take place: the speech must be grammatically correct (this virtue is called Latinitas), clearly understandable (perspicuitas), aesthetically pleasing (ornatus), and appropriate both for the social circumstances where it will be delivered and for the literary genre to which it belongs (aptum). Or-natus has a privileged position among these qualities: it takes precedence over Latinitas and perspicuitas, since expressions that are unclear or not convention-ally grammatical may be retained in the name of linguistic elegance, but more importantly, it is the most eective virtue of all in terms of realizing the purpose of the speech, which is the persuasion of the speaker's audience. The linguistic elegance of a speech helps to capture the audience's attention and to create in them a positively predisposed state of mind; the pleasure (delectatio) of listen-ing to it creates positive emotions towards its contents as well as its form, and as a consequence, creates trust (des) in its truthfulness (see Lausberg, 1998, 243).

Among the tools for achieving ornatus, metonymy belongs to the class of tropes (tropi or τρόποι). Tropes involve the substitution of a word standing in the natural context of a sentence with a word that is not typically used in that context (and which therefore assumes a gurative interpretation). Other

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tropes include hyperbole, antonomasia, litote, metaphor, and irony.1_The

sub-stitution of a word with another is called immutatio. However, this designation also includes cases where a word is replaced with a semantically related term (a synonym) which is more appropriate to the context. Tropes, on the other hand, necessarily involve the substitution of a verbum proprium (a word that is commonly and adequately used in a certain context) with an improper word. Technically, then, the use of tropes in a sentence is an improprietas, because it involves an improper use of the words of the language, thus going against the virtue of grammaticality (Latinitas). In order to keep it from being banned as a vitium (an inadequacy of the speech), the use of a trope must be aesthetically pleasing, thus contributing to ornatus. Moreover, the discourse must remain in-telligible to the audience: it should be clear from the context that the intention of the speaker (voluntas) is that the new word must have the same meaning as the word it replaces. In this case, instead of causing an error, the tropical use of a word assigns a new meaning to it. Lausberg (1969) and Mortara Garavelli (1989) both note that the original meaning of trope (τρόπος) is direction or turn. Therefore a rhetorical trope may be described as the deviation (turn) of the denotation function of a linguistic expression from its original content to a new one. The eect of such creative uses of language is to elicit surprise or reection in the audience of the speech, which may in turn lead to aesthetical enjoyment.

There are many dierent classications of tropes, and there has been much disagreement both among rhetorical theoreticians of the past and in more recent times as to how many gures in language should be recognized as tropes. However, most classications include metonymy and synechdoche, two tropes that can both be associated with the notion of metonymy as it is commonly dened today in linguistics. Μετωνυμία (metonymia in Latin transliteration) can be literally translated as change of name; it is also called denominatio (a calc of the Greek term) by Quintilian or ὑπαλλαγή (exchange) by Cicero. Συνεκδοχή(synecdoche) means simultaneous understanding, and is also called intellectio (understanding).

Both metonymy and synecdoche consist in the replacement of the verbum proprium by another word whose actual meaning stands in a real relationship to the intended meaning in the particular instance (Lausberg, 1998, 256-257). For example, if a speaker uses the name of a person to stand for an object that person possesses, then the relationship between the two (the person possesses the object) is a relation that exists in the real world. According to Lausberg, the dierence between metonymy and synecdoche lies in the nature of the relation-ship between the actual meaning of the tropically used word and its intended meaning: in the case of metonymy, the relation is qualitative in nature, while in the case of synecdoche it is quantitative. What Lausberg means by this is that synecdoche specically relates objects that dier in size or quantity from 1_{These examples are taken from Lausberg (1998). As I will note below, however, there is}

much disagreement among authors (both classical and modern) on the number and charac-terization of the tropes. Thus, the complete catalogue of the gures that may dened as such varies depending on the author.

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one another, such as parts and wholes, where one object is necessarily larger than the other, while the relations involved in metonymy are more varied and more dicult to describe. However, this distinction does not come from classical rhetoric: it has often been noted in modern works on rhetoric (see e.g. Mortara Garavelli, 1989, 156; Le Guern, 1973, 11-12) that the rhetorical theoreticians from the classical age have not been able to develop specic identifying criteria for metonymy and synechdoche. Instead, they have contented themselves with compiling detailed lists of cases which exemplify various types of these tropes. This hints at a diculty in developing a denition for metonymy which has carried over to modern linguistic studies of this phenomenon, as we shall see. In the case of μετωνυμία, the types listed in classical works include (according to Lausberg):

the person/object relationship, where the person stands in a real relation-ship (e.g. owner, producer, etc.) with the object and vice versa; specic types include authors for their works, divinities for their area of function (Mars for war), and owners for their property;

the container/content relationship: the container can also be a place or time, and the content can encompass objects or persons, e.g. Greece for the Greeks, saeculum (era) for people and circumstances of the era; the cause/eect relationship, e.g. vulnera dirigere (shoot wounds) for

directing wound-producing shots, which is often also applied to adjec-tives, as in: pigrum frigus (sluggish cold) for cold that makes people sluggish;

the abstract/concrete relationship, e.g. dirimere iras (soothe anger) for those inamed with anger;

the symbolic relationship, e.g. arma (weapons) for war. For σvυνεκδοχή, the types include:

the part/whole relationship, in both directions: e.g. frigidus annus (cold year) for winter, puppis (stern) for ship;

the genus/species relationship, also in both directions;

the number relationship, where the singular is substituted for the plural and vice versa.

The inclusion of metonymy and synecdoche in the discussion of ornatus might lead us to think that ancient theoreticians of rhetoric thought of them as pure embellishments found only in high literary contexts (such as poetry and ora-torical literature). This is not true, however. Classical scholars of rhetoric had already noted that tropes can occur both in literary and in colloquial language: for example, Quintilian made the following remark with regard to emphasis: Emphasis is also found in the phrases of every day, such as Be a man! or He

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is but mortal, or We must live! So like, as a rule, is nature to art (Inst. or. 8.3.86, Butler, 1996, 259). Not only did classical scholars recognize that tropes could be found in various registers of language; they also noticed that dierent tropes have dierent degrees of habitualization (to use a term found in Lausberg, 1969, 1998), that is to say, some tropes used by speakers are truly creative and original, while others already have a certain degree of circulation within a cer-tain register or genre. Finally, it was also recognized that tropes were not only used as linguistic embellishments: in some cases, they were used in order to des-ignate objects which lacked an appropriate expression in the language, thereby coining new words. This phenomenon was called κατάχρησvις or, in Latin, abusio, and is a case where tropes are used out of necessity in order to counterbalance scarcity (inopia) in the lexicon of a language. Quintilian provides some ex-amples of κατάχρησvις based on metonymy: iaculari originally means to throw the javelin, but is extended to mean throw (any object) (Inst. or. 8.2.4); similarly, aedicare is extended from building houses to building (anything), and πυξίς, which originally means box made of boxwood, is extended to box (made of any wood) (Inst. or. 8.6.34). These words are clearly not instances of ornatus: they are used in common language, and are not perceived as out of the ordinary, even though they originated from tropes. As such, they do not generate surprise or reection, nor do they contribute to the aesthetic quality of a sentence: they have entirely lost the normal function of literary tropes. It is evident from these observations that classical scholars of rhetoric were already aware of the distinction between the common and literary use of tropes that has been subsequently emphasized in Cognitive Linguistics. What has changed is the focus of attention: for classical authors, it was the literary and artistic value of tropes, while for modern linguistics it is their use in everyday speech.

2.3 Formal approaches

There are not many studies in formal semantics or pragmatics which deal di-rectly with metonymy. However, there are quite a few works which focus on linguistic phenomena that are related to it. These studies contribute to the un-derstanding of metonymy by oering a dierent perspective on it. The two most well-studied phenomena of this kind are regular polysemy and so-called logical metonymy or coercion. Regular polysemy is a special case of lexical ambiguity that involves entire classes of nouns undergoing systematic sense alternations, in contrast with the idiosyncratic variations in meaning that often occur in the lexicon. These sense alternations are often based on metonymic relations. For example, the use of rabbit to mean rabbit meat, as in We ate rabbit today, is an instance of regular polysemy, because the same pattern (animal meat of the animal) applies in the same way to a class of animal-denoting nouns which includes chicken and various types of sh; this pattern has also traditionally been dened as a metonymic relation. It is possible that regular polysemy is ac-tually a consequence of the conventionalization and lexicalization of metonymic uses of words, but as we shall see, not all the data line up with this

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expla-nation. Logical metonymy is a phenomenon which is in some ways analogous to metonymy, because it seems to involve a shift in the reference of the object nouns of certain specic predicates: for example, in a sentence like John enjoyed the book, the book seems to undergo a reference shift from the object book to the event of reading the book (and an acceptable paraphrase of this sentence is in fact John enjoyed reading the book). However, this phenomenon is restricted to a specic (and fairly small) set of contexts, and it is unclear whether it may be explained by the same mechanisms as metonymy. I will discuss the litera-ture on regular polysemy and logical metonymy in paragraphs 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 respectively.

2.3.1 Regular polysemy

The expression regular polysemy seems to have been coined by Apresjan (1974) in a paper which investigated the systematic polysemy of Russian nouns (specif-ically deverbal nouns). Since then, it has been an object of interest in various formal approaches to the study of the lexicon. On the one hand, there are studies like Pustejovsky (1995, 2008a) and Copestake and Briscoe (1995), which pro-pose a semantic explanation of the phenomenon, in terms of rules or processes which involve the lexical information encoded in nouns; on the other, there are works such as those by Nunberg (Nunberg, 1979; Nunberg and Zaenen, 1992; Nunberg, 1995), which posit that the phenomenon must be explained within the realm of pragmatics.

Pustejovsky's account of regular polysemy takes place within his general model of lexical knowledge, the Generative Lexicon (henceforth, GL). GL was developed with the aim of providing a compositional semantics for language that accounts for the contextual modulations in meaning that occur in real lin-guistic usage (Pustejovsky and Jezek, 2008, 184). GL views the lexicon as dynamic: word meanings are not xed, but can inuence one another when words occur together in context. In order to describe this process, GL provides a formal description of the lexical semantic representation of nouns and of the mechanisms which are used to exploit this information compositionally in con-text. The interaction between these two pieces of formal machinery explains how polysemous interpretations of words can come about.

In the GL model, every lexical item has four levels of representation avail-able to it: Lexical Typing Structure, Argument Structure, Event Structure, and Qualia Structure. Every lexical item is associated with a type, which is related to other structures within a type lattice. There are three principal levels of types in the system, each associated with a dierent level of complexity: nat-ural, artifactual, and complex types. (More thorough descriptions of the type structure, along with the formal architecture instantiating it and its conceptual underpinnings, may be found in Pustejovsky, 1998, 2001, 2006).

Natural types refer to natural entities in the world (e.g. lion, rock, water), while artifactual types refer to entities with some function, purpose, or iden-tied origin (Pustejovsky, 2008b, 78). The main dierence between the two consists in their Qualia Structure. Qualia can be described as pieces of

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informa-tion that characterize each lexical entry and describe the relainforma-tion between the entity denoted by the lexical item and the real world (the relational force of a lexical item: Pustejovsky, 1995, 76). In Pustejovsky (1995, 2001), four main qualia roles are dened:

1. formal: the basic category which distinguishes an object within a larger domain;

2. constitutive: the relation between an object and its constituent parts; 3. telic: its purpose and function;

4. agentive: factors involved in its origin or bringing it about.

Natural types only have the formal and constitutive role in their qualia structure, which is a direct consequence of the fact that they were not created by human beings; artifactuals, on the other hand, also have a telic and an agentive role.

Complex types are structurally dierent from natural and artifactual types in that they are constituted by two (or more) semantic types instead of one. Complex types are assigned to lexical items that instantiate objects with several distinct or even incompatible aspects: each constituent type picks out a dierent aspect of the object. From a formal point of view, the constituent types are clustered together by the type construction operation (dot), which is why complex types are also called dot types or dot objects. A typical example of a complex type is the noun book, which denotes both the informational content of the entity book, and its physical manifestation: its complex type will therefore be physical object information. Some predicates may select for only one of the types instantiated by a dot object, thus inuencing which aspect of the entity is expressed during semantic composition with dierent predicates (see sentences (1 a)-(1 b), from Pustejovsky and Jezek, 2008, 193).

(1) (a) The author will be discussing her new book. (information) (b) Jen almost dropped the book, then hastily replaced it on the shelf.

(physical object)

However, there are also predicates which select for the entire complex type, such as read, which requires arguments of the type physical object information. In the case of book, then, read predicates over both aspects of the noun.

Cases like (1 a)-(1 b), where the interpretation of a noun changes depending on the predicate it occurs with, are explained in GL by compositional mech-anisms which allow predicative expressions to modulate the semantic types of their arguments. There are three main mechanisms which may be involved in the interaction between a predicate and its argument in context:

1. pure selection (type matching): the type a predicate requires is directly satised by the argument;

2. accommodation: the type a predicate requires is inherited by the argu-ment;

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3. type coercion: the type a predicate requires is imposed on the argument type. Coercion may take two forms:

(a) exploitation: taking a part of the argument's type to satisfy the predicate. The part involved may be either a qualia role or, in the case of complex types, a component type;

(b) introduction: wrapping the argument with the type required by the predicate.

Pustejovsky (1995) makes a basic distinction between homonymy and polysemy. Homonymy is a kind of meaning ambiguity where two distinct and unrelated meanings are accidentally expressed by the same lexical item, e.g. bank nan-cial institution vs. bank the rising ground bordering a river. This is reected in the semantic representation of the words involved: the two senses of bank have two independent lexical entries with dierent formal representations. Pol-ysemy, on the other hand, involves lexical senses which are manifestations of the same basic meaning of the word as it occurs in dierent contexts (Puste-jovsky, 1995, 28). In Pustejovsky's model, lexical polysemy is a result of type coercion: the interaction with the selectional requirements of dierent predicates leads nouns to be interpreted in dierent ways, which in turn leads speakers to assign dierent senses to them.

There are two dierent types of polysemy, depending on the semantic type of the noun undergoing coercion. Complex types manifest inherent polysemy, because the potential for receiving multiple interpretations is inherent in the lexical item itself, given that it has an inherently complex semantic structure. Natural and artifactual types are instead subject to selectional polysemy: the possibility for multiple interpretations of these lexical items arises only from contextual inuences, namely from their interaction with the selectional prefer-ences of predicating expressions in context.

Where does metonymy enter in all this? In Pustejovsky (2005) and Puste-jovsky and Jezek (2008), various examples of inherent polysemy and selectional polysemy are discussed in some detail. Quite a few of them would be tradi-tionally dened as cases of metonymy. Some of them are explained as cases of type exploitation involving dot types (dot exploitation); others as artifactual ex-ploitation; others yet, as cases of type introduction. The fact that Pustejovsky has found so many dierent mechanisms to explain dierent cases of metonymy puts the internal coherence of the category of metonymy in doubt and perhaps also its solidity in terms of a theoretical construct. For now, I will leave the question open, and I will go on to discuss some examples in more detail.

Pustejovsky (2005) presents a catalogue of dot objects classed according to their constituent types. Some of the type pairings he identies could easily be considered metonymies (see examples (2)-(5)).

(2) Event Human appointment

a. Your next appointment is at 3:00 pm. (event) b. Your next appointment is a blonde. (human)

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(3) Organization (Information Physical obj )2

magazine, newspaper, journal

a. The magazine red its editor. (organization) b. The cup is on top of the magazine. (physical obj ) c. I disagreed with the magazine. (information) (4) Producer Product

Honda, IBM, Microsoft

a. Honda raised prices last week. (producer) b. I used to drive a Honda. (product)

(5) Tree Wood (specialization of Producer Product) oak, elm, pine

a. We trimmed our oak last fall. (producer) b. We used oak for our cabinets. (product)

By Pustejovsky's account, then, these instances of metonymy can be explained by the fact that the lexical items involved have a complex type, which includes in itself various aspects of the object it refers to. The eect of metonymy or sense extension is obtained by the fact that, in context, dierent predicates select for a dierent subtype, thereby highlighting one specic component of the word's semantic structure (and therefore, one specic aspect of the object) in that particular occasion of use.

On the other hand, many of the noun classes identied as dot objects in Pustejovsky (2005) do not show sense alternations that would be tradition-ally classied as metonymies: for example, when book is used exclusively in its physical object sense (e.g. That book is stained with coee), it is not typically considered a metonymic extension of the meaning of the word book. The same intuitive reasoning holds for examples (6)-(8) below.

(6) State Proposition belief

a. Nothing can shake John's belief. (state) b. John's belief is obviously false. (proposition) (7) Attribute Value

temperature, weight, height, tension, strength a. The temperature is 90. (attribute)

b. The temperature is rising. (value) (8) Process Result

construction, depiction, imitation, classication, portrayal, reference, rendering, etc.

a. Linnaeus's classication of the species took 25 years. (process) b. Linnaeus's classication contains 3000 species. (result)

2_{This is a nested dot type: one of its constituent types is organization, while the other}

is in turn another dot type, Information Physical obj. For details see Pustejovsky (1995, Chapter 8).

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Based on these data, it is not possible to equate metonymy with inherent poly-semy. Not all complex types can give rise to metonymy, nor is metonymy always explained by reference to an underlying dot type, as the following examples will show. In Pustejovsky and Jezek (2008), some instances of sense extension which would have been traditionally dened as metonymic are explained either as cases of artifactual exploitation, as type introduction, or as qualia introduction on nat-ural types. (9) shows an example of artifactual exploitation: in pour a glass

and similar cases, the predicate requires the type liquid as a direct object. The value from the Telic quale of glass is therefore lifted onto the type structure of the noun and then exploited in semantic composition. In this kind of context, then, glass is coerced into the type liquid.3 _{Pustejovsky (2005, 3-4) identies a}

whole class of nouns which undergo this sense alternation, as shown in (10). (9) glass: artifactual type, phys obj: qualetelichold(liquid)

examples: drink, pour, down, swallow a glass

(10) Container / Containee

bottle, bucket, carton, kettle, shovel, spoon, teacup, etc. a. Bob broke the bottle accidentally.

b. Mary drank the whole bottle.

Some other cases of metonymy are explained by type introduction. As men-tioned above, introduction wraps the type of the argument with the type required by the predicate. Not all introductions are possible; it is important that the new information be semantically compatible with the lexical represen-tation and with the ontological properties of the argument. Some examples are shown in (11 a)-(12).

(11) (a) I opened the wine carefully.

(b) Just as he was about to open the beer, the doorbell rang. (12) That is why I read Dante now.

In (11 a) and (11 b), the type of wine and beer is wrapped with the container type, required by the predicate open. This is acceptable because wine and beer are artifactual liquids typically stored in containers.

(12) a renowned example of metonymy in the linguistic literature is instead explained as a special case of dot introduction, where the predicate read (which we have already seen selects for a complex type phys obj info) imposes the whole complex type on its argument. The predication is felicitous because the type of the argument is the human agent of a writing activity, i.e. a writer. Writer is an artifactual type with the Telic value write; semantic anity with book makes it possible for it to be wrapped with the type of book (specically, it will be interpreted as meaning the books that that author has written). The 3_{This specic case actually involves exploitation of the object argument of the telic quale}

of glass, i.e. liquid. The predicates therefore are applied to the liquid held in the glass. Pustejovsky calls this Argument Structure Exploitation (Pustejovsky and Jezek, 2008, 202).

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same process occurs with the verb listen, which selects for the complex type sound info (the type of music): writers of music can be wrapped with this complex type in sentences like listening to the Beatles.

Finally, some other metonymies are explained as qualia introduction on a natural type, as in examples (13)-(15).

(13) I ate sh yesterday. (14) Animal / Food

chicken, lamb, rabbit, many kinds of sh a. The lamb is running in the eld. b. John ate lamb for breakfast. (15) Animal / Artifact-Fur

beaver, chinchilla, mink a. I saw a beaver.

b. Mary wears beaver in the winter.

When a verb selecting for an artifactual type combines with a natural type and coerces it to a certain function or purpose, qualia introduction occurs. In sentence (13) above, the natural type sh is coerced by the predicate eat into an artifactual type which has the purpose of being eaten, i.e., food. The meaning of sh thus becomes something akin to food derived from sh. Pustejovsky (2005, 3-4) identies two classes of nouns that systematically undergo sense alternations based on qualia introduction, exemplied in (14) and (15).

As a nal note, there are also cases in Pustejovsky's model where the correct interpretation of nouns in context is established by pragmatic, not semantic, mechanisms. This occurs in example (16) below.

(16) I ought to cancel the milk tomorrow.

In this sentence, we would normally expect an exploitation of the Telic value of milk, drink; however, the predicate cancel overrides this interpretation and introduces a dierent meaning, derived by inference (milk delivery). The infor-mation provided by qualia exploitation (and by the other processes of semantic composition) is therefore defeasible in context.4_{The use of milk in (16) could}

be reasonably dened as a case of unconventional (novel) metonymy; this time, the proposed process underlying its interpretation is pragmatic. Pustejovsky's works therefore present a wide variety of mechanisms to account for phenom-ena which have all been grouped together, in other works, as metonymic sense extensions.

Ann Copestake and Ted Briscoe's account of regular polysemy (and of metonymic sense extensions, in the cases where they are involved) is less complex than

4_{Pustejovsky supports a specic view of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics,}

where the lexicon provides default interpretations that are then accepted or refused (overrid-den) by the pragmatic mechanisms involved in the interpretation of words in context. This is a view of the semantics-pragmatics interface which is common both to Pustejovsky and to Briscoe and Copestake, whose works I will discuss below; see e.g. Asher and Pustejovsky (2005); Lascarides and Copestake (1998).

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Pustejovsky's, even though their framework is quite similar. The approach which they call the semi-generative lexicon is described in Copestake (1992, 1995, 2001); Copestake and Briscoe (1995); Briscoe and Copestake (1999), among other works.

Copestake and Briscoe's main starting point is that many phenomena in-volving lexical relations may be described by semi-generative or semi-productive rules, i.e. generative rules whose application is limited by conventional, language-specic constraints. The approach is formulated with natural language process-ing systems in mind: one reason for the rather limited uptake of generative lexical devices in practical natural language processing systems has been the lack of techniques for control of their eects. It is much better in practice to ignore productivity and lose a small proportion of examples than to allow it and be able to process nothing! (Copestake, 2001, 1). In Copestake and Briscoe's view, lexical rules can be used to account for a wide range of phenomena in-volving morphological, syntactic and semantic changes in word forms, such as derivational morphology, compound formation, verb alternations, and system-atic polysemy. In each case, lexical rules are semi-regular and semi-productive, i.e. they apply to certain classes of words, but with some conventional restric-tions, and they can be used innovatively, but again, with some conventional restrictions. For example, the animal meat of the animal pattern that was discussed earlier applies to a wide class of animal nouns, but not all of them: pig and cow, for instance, are excluded.

It seems impossible to dene the classes to which these rules apply by using semantic criteria. For Copestake and Briscoe, the semi-productivity of rules may instead be accounted for by assuming rules that are sensitive to both type and token frequency eects. Every lexical rule is associated with a probability value which is derived by comparing the number of lexemes to which the rule could apply where that sense is unattested, to those for which it is attested. The underlying assumption is that, when there are no contextual cues indicating otherwise, speakers will choose well-attested high-frequency forms to realise particular senses and listeners [will] choose well-attested high-frequency senses when faced with ambiguity (Copestake, 1995, 23). This is particularly relevant in cases where a listener is faced with the task of interpreting a novel use of a word.

In their account of systematic polysemy, Copestake and Briscoe make a dis-tinction between constructional polysemy and sense extension. Constructional polysemy covers the cases where a lexical entry has a single, partly underspec-ied sense which is then contextually specialized in dierent ways. This kind of polysemy is also called vagueness. An example is reel, which is said to have a basic underspecied representation which states that it is a container artifact with the purpose of (un)winding, where the wound-up material is left largely unspecied. Sense extension, on the other hand, predictably relates two or more senses (Copestake and Briscoe, 1995, 15), and is also dened as ambigu-ity. Many cases of sense extension discussed by Copestake and Briscoe (1995) are typical cases of conventionalized metonymy, as in examples (17)-(20).

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(17) Sandy likes to eat rabbit. animal meat

(18) Sandy likes to wear rabbit. animal fur/skin

(19) After several lorries had run over the body, there was rabbit splattered all over the road.

physical object substance (20) He bought two beers.

comestible substance conventional portion

In the generative lexicon framework, these cases are all motivated by semi-productive lexical rules. The formal structure used by Copestake and Briscoe follows Pustejovsky's model of the semantic representation associated with each lexical entry, and therefore includes Lexical Typing Structure and Qualia Struc-ture.

Examples (17)-(19) are all generated by slightly dierent versions of the same rule, called Grinding. In its most general form, this rule creates mass nouns denoting an unindividuated substance from count nouns denoting an individuated physical object of some kind. This form of the rule is the basis for example (19). However, there are also subcases of Grinding which apply to semantically specied parts of the lexicon: Meat-grinding generates example (17) and Fur-grinding example (18). Since these cases of sense extension yield a more specic meaning and seem to be conventionalized, they are assigned their own lexical rules, although Meat-grinding and Fur-grinding are said to inherit structure from the more general Grinding rule.

The Grinding rule turns a countable noun into an uncountable noun with the appropriate qualia structure for an unindividuated substance, i.e. a mass specication in its formal quale. Grinding can apply, in principle, to any item of the lexicon. On the other hand, Meat-grinding and Fur-grinding can only apply to lexical items which have the Animal type. Meat-grinding and Fur-grinding also specify an appropriate telic quale for the resulting noun, indicating consume and wear respectively as the typical function for the derived entity. Example (20) is explained by an analogous rule, Portioning, which converts food or drink denoting mass nouns into count nouns denoting a portion of that substance.

The relative productivity of the three grinding rules is determined by the observation of corpus data, as explained above. Interestingly, Copestake and Briscoe (1995)'s results show that the most productive of these three rules is the more specic Meat-grinding, while the least productive is Grinding. This implies that in an unmarked context, such as a sentence like John enjoyed the rabbit, the most plausible (and most frequent) interpretation of rabbit will be rabbit meat. The senses resulting from the less productive rules will be more likely to appear in contexts requiring that specic interpretation rather than unmarked ones.

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For Copestake and Briscoe, these rules [are] equally applicable to deriva-tional processes, as well as those of conversion, in that we treat all such lexical processes as mappings between lexical (and occasionally phrasal) signs. From our perspective, it is accidental that some rules specify phonological modi-cations whilst others do not (Copestake and Briscoe, 1995, 17). This posi-tion is based on the fact that there are many parallels between sense extension and morphological composition/derivation, both within the same language and cross-linguistically. For example, the container contents sense extension found in a sentence like He drank a bottle has the same semantic eects of the morphological rule which allows suxation with -ful of words denoting contain-ers (e.g. bottle bottleful). For a cross-linguistic example, the sense extension that relates the name of a tree to the fruit it bears in English has a grammatical counterpart in Italian and Spanish where the two senses are assigned a dierent grammatical gender, as in It. melo apple tree vs. mela apple. Therefore, it seems more economical to assume that all these processes are governed by the same kinds of lexical rules, which vary from language to language (or within a language) according to the grammatical and phonological specications they require. Copestake and Briscoe also accept the possibility that sense extensions may be applied to phrases, although such uses may be quite restricted. For example, it is possible to say Three villages / Three villages south of the river voted for the proposed ban on timber production, but not Three villages built of stone voted. . . . The semantic criterion for this dierence (if indeed there is one) is not clear.

Copestake and Briscoe (see Copestake and Briscoe, 1995, Copestake, 2001) propose that an account based on lexical rules with a productivity index based on probabilities can also be used to explain non-conventional metonymic uses, such asThe ham sandwich is waiting for his check (where ham sandwich refers to the customer who ordered the ham sandwich in a restaurant). They note that such metonymic uses aect verb agreement, pronominal agreement, and reexivization (compare The french fries is getting impatient with ?The french fries are getting impatient). This suggests to the authors that these uses are at least partly lexicalized, and therefore must be treated as distinct word senses, generated by lexical rules just like the more conventionalized cases discussed above. They assume that such cases may be generated by a very broad lexical rule that converts nouns denoting physical objects to people associated with those objects. The overgeneration which naturally follows from the broadness of the rule is constrained by the fact it would have a very low productivity, based on the scarcity of examples of its use that are actually found in normal corpora. Since the productivity of the rule is so low, it must be assumed that in the great majority of cases, speakers will not apply it. According to Copestake and Briscoe, such a rule will be employed only in situations where the discourse con-text is highly constrained, thereby limiting the potential for misunderstanding. In fact, we know that such uses are usually limited to specic discourse contexts, such as a conversation between waiters in a restaurant for ham sandwich.

Copestake and Briscoe's approach provides a clear-cut account of metonymy, dividing it into two categories: conventionalized uses (to any degree) and novel

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uses. Conventionalized metonymies are classied as cases of sense extension (systematic polysemy), accounted for by lexical rules with varying levels of pro-ductivity, calculated on the basis of their frequency of use. All conventionalized metonymies are accounted for by the same mechanism, with small variations related to the kind of lexical information that the rule acts on. In fact, the same mechanism accounts for a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, including morphological derivation and conversion; this account focuses on the similari-ties between metonymy and other processes in the lexicon, rather than on the dierences. The authors concede that metonymy as a process for creating novel senses might be explained in purely pragmatic terms, but when it becomes in-volved in lexical phenomena like regular polysemy, the pragmatic account must be overlaid by a theoretical structure such as lexical rules or licenses which will provide a general account for typical lexical phenomena such as irregu-lar patterns of conventionalization and grammaticalization. Thus, only novel metonymies are regulated exclusively by pragmatic factors; the authors do not go into detail about what these pragmatic factors are, but their model includes an interface with pragmatics and refers to work by Lascarides and Copestake (1998) for more details. The most interesting aspect of Copestake and Briscoe's model, however, is that lexical rules are associated with a productivity index, which accounts for all rule preferences and default uses. This kind of structure makes it easy to explain why some metonymic readings are preferred with re-spect to others in non-marked contexts, for instance, as in the case study of the Grinding rules mentioned above.

In contrast to Pustejovsky and Copestake and Briscoe, Georey Nunberg's account of regular polysemy is essentially a pragmatic one. Examples (21)-(29) show some of the cases of regular polysemy that Nunberg aims to explain (Nunberg, 1979, 148).

(21) (a) The window was broken. (= window glass) (b) The window was boarded up. (=window opening) (22) (a) The newspaper weighs ve pounds. (= publication)

(b) The newspaper red John. (= publisher) (23) (a) The chicken pecked the ground. (= bird) (b) We ate chicken in bean sauce. (= meat) (24) (a) The chair was broken. (= chair token)

(b) The chair was common in nineteenth-century parlors. (= chair type)

(25) (a) The book weighed ve pounds. (= book copy) (b) The book has been refuted. (= book content) (26) (a) We got the news by radio. (= medium)

(b) The radio is broken. (= radio set) (27) (a) France is a republic. (= nation)

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(28) (a) The game is hard to learn. (= rules) (b) The game lasted an hour. (= activity) (29) (a) Vanity is a vice. (= the quality of being vain)

(b) His vanity surprised my friends. (= the extent of his vanity) Clearly, there are many dierent types of sense extension among these examples (only some of which qualify as metonymies in the traditional sense). However, instead of multiplying lexical conventions (Nunberg, 1979, 148) by postulating dierent lexical rules of sense extension for each of these cases, Nunberg wants to construct a general interpretation process valid for all possible instances of regular polysemy. This process depends on contextual information and speakers' encyclopedic knowledge as well as semantic information.

Nunberg's main argument in favor of a pragmatic treatment of sense exten-sion is that this phenomenon does not just occur with words carrying lexical information, but with demonstratives, as well. This gives rise to a process he calls deferred ostension, whereby a speaker can point at a newspaper and obtain reference to the company that published it, by uttering a sentence like (30).

(30) That was bought by Hearst last week.

Since demonstratives have no lexical content, there can be no lexical ambiguity involved in this process: it must be based exclusively on pragmatic reasoning on the part of the speaker and hearer.

Another argument presented by Nunberg in favor of his approach is related to coreference in copredicational constructions. These are constructions where two or more predicates are applied to the same object. In cases of homonymy, two predicates selecting for two dierent senses of a word cannot be applied to the same word. For example, see sentence (31), which contains the homonymous noun le. File has two dierent senses, tool and dossier.

(31) Bill gave Harry a le, and received one from Jane.

In no case can (31) be used to mean that Bill gave Harry a tool and received a dossier from Jane. However, with cases of polysemy such as those shown above, the copredication of two dierent senses of the same word seems perfectly acceptable, as shown in (32).

(32) The newspaper [publishing company] has decided to change its [physical copy] format.

Examples such as this one lead Nunberg to propose that words that undergo regular polysemy, like newspaper, only have one lexically encoded sense and are subject to sense extensions via a pragmatic process.

How does this process take place? Nunberg begins by assuming that the relation between a noun (or a demonstrative) and its designation can be rep-resented by a referring function (Nunberg, 1979, 156), which takes nouns or indicated objects into intended referents. When a speaker uses a noun or an

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ostensive act to refer to a certain entity, the hearer must determine which re-ferring function the speaker is using in order to understand his or her utterance correctly.

There are a few basic conditions which the referring function must satisfy in order to provide an appropriate interpretation of the speaker's act of reference. The range of the referring function must intersect the range of reference, i.e. the set of things that the speaker might rationally be construed as intending to refer to in a given context. This is determined by the nature of the predicate used, by contextual considerations, such as the topic of conversation, and sometimes by the morphology of the referring noun. The word that the speaker is using must also fall manifestly within the range of the referring function. Furthermore, it must be common knowledge that there is an association between the intended referent and the referring noun. For example, if the speaker wants to use a certain artifact (e.g. a car) to refer to the year when it was built, the manufacturing year of the artifact must be fairly well-known. This guarantees a certain ease of identication of the intended referent on the hearer's part.

Assuming all these conditions are met, the main criterion for the selection of the appropriate referring function is its cue-validity: this is the probability with which a given referent b can be identied as being the value of a certain function f at a [referring noun] a (Nunberg, 1979, 160). In other terms, when searching for the indended referent for a noun which is not used with its usual denotation, the hearer will select the one that has the highest relative probability of being associated with that noun. In Nunberg's view, this correlates with the relative usefulness of a given description for the purpose of identiying a certain referent.

In subsequent works (e.g. Nunberg, 1995; Nunberg and Zaenen, 1992), Nun-berg has to some extent changed and rened his account of regular polysemy. In Nunberg (1979), polysemy involved a shift in reference, from referring noun (or indicated object) to intended referent. In Nunberg (1995), this notion is substituted by the notion of transfer of meaning. Transfers of meaning are a class of productive linguistic processes that enable speakers to use the same expression to refer to distinct sorts or categories of things. They do not involve a shift in reference, but rather a shift in the semantic properties that are as-signed to a word. This dierence is perhaps more important for its philosophical implications than for its linguistic ones, but is has also led Nunberg to propose a dierent interpretation of certain metonymic examples. Take sentences (33) and (34):

(33) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check. [the customer who ordered a ham sandwich]

(34) Nixon bombed Hanoi. [the US Army commanded by Nixon]

These are apparently two cases of metonymy where the subject is used to evoke a dierent intended referent: the customer who ordered the ham sandwich in (33), the US Army commanded by Nixon in (34). However, they show

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diverging behavior in contexts featuring anaphoric reference, as shown in (35) and (36).

(35) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check, and he (= the customer) is getting restless /? and it (= the sandwich) looks rather stale.

(36) Nixon bombed Hanoi, and he (=Nixon) knew what he was doing /? but they (=the soldiers) were under orders.

The anaphoric pronoun can denote only the intended referent in the ham sand-wich case, but in the Nixon case it can only refer to Nixon (the appropriate denotation of the noun). This would be inexplicable if metonymy actually in-volved a shift of reference. Nunberg explains the dierence between these two examples by dierentiating between two kinds of meaning transfer: deferred indexical reference (or reference transfer) and predicate transfer.

The dierence between the two examples is that in (35), the metonymy is localized in the NP (the ham sandwich): that is, the expression ham sand-wich is used to refer to an object that corresponds in a certain way to [. . . ] the semantic character of the expression (Nunberg, 1995, 111); in (36), on the other hand, the locus of the metonymy is actually the predicate, which expresses a property in logic. In Nunberg's words, the name of a property that applies to something in one domain [is] used as the name of a property that applies to things in another domain, provided the two properties correspond in a cer-tain way (Nunberg, 1995, 111). Therefore, bombed, for example, goes from expressing the property of bombing, which is applied to soldiers or airplanes, for instance, to something we may call the property of making someone bomb something, which is applied to Nixon (and other military authorities). The metonymic transfer of meaning is therefore something like from bomb to make bomb or cause a bombing. Predicate transfer is subject to two constraints: one, there must be some sort of correspondence between the property denoted by the derived predicate and the one designated by the original predicate; two, the property contributed by the new predicate must be somehow noteworthy (Nunberg, 1995, 114). Noteworthiness can be realized as usefulness for immedi-ate conversational purposes (a property is noteworthy if it oers a useful way of classifying its bearer relative to immediate conversational interests), or in a more general way, when the derived property has an abiding interest or consequence for its bearer, beyond the immediate conversational purposes. Nunberg's pro-posal for essentially two dierent types of metonymy (associated with dierent types of meaning transfer) has sparked some discussion in cognitive linguistic studies of metonymy, as we shall see below.

2.3.2 Logical metonymy

The label logical metonymy was rst proposed by James Pustejovsky in the framework of GL theory (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1993, 1995). This linguistic phe-nomenon usually involves an interaction between a predicate that normally ap-plies to an event, such as begin, nish, enjoy, want, and a direct object which

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refers to a material entity of some kind. The interpretation of sentences con-taining such verb-object pairings usually involves deriving an event in which the direct object noun is involved. A few typical examples are in sentences (37), (38) and (39):

(37) John began the book. (John began reading the book) (38) Sue enjoyed the lm. (Sue enjoyed watching the lm) (39) Mary wants a beer. (Mary wants to drink a beer)

The sentence in italics next to each example shows the typical interpretation that is assigned to each of these sentences. Pustejovsky (1995) explains this phenomenon in terms of type coercion. Predicates such as the ones listed above require that their argument be of the event type, but books, lms, and beers are objects, not events. Therefore, it is necessary to assume that type coercion is applied by the predicates to the objects in question in sentences like (37), (38) and (39), in order for them to be acceptable in the language. Pustejovsky de-nes such cases as logical metonymy because they involve a stand-for relation between a subpart of the lexical information for a certain word and the word itself (a logical argument of a semantic type (selected by a function) denotes the semantic type itself, Pustejovsky, 1991, 425).

Pustejovsky explains the type shifting which occurs in logical metonymy by making reference to the semantic structure of the nouns involved, and speci-cally to their qualia roles. In a case like (37), the event type is forced on the complement a book by reconstructing an event reading from book's telic quale (the purpose of a book is reading it). In examples (38) and (39), the event in-terpretation of the object is also based on the telic quale. It is also possible for an event reading to be derived from the agentive quale: for example, if a lm di-rector says I particularly enjoyed this lm, one plausible interpretation is that he enjoyed making this lm, which draws on the agentive quale of lm. The underlying assumption for this approach is that lexical information related to predicates and their arguments is not static, as in the sense-enumerative theories of the lexicon that Pustejovsky argues against, but interactive: the meanings of words and phrases in context may emerge compositionally as a result of the interaction between the semantics of dierent words.

This approach to explaining logical metonymy has been criticized for not taking into sucient account some aspects of the empirical data relative to the phenomenon. For instance, Godard and Jayez (1993) take issue with Puste-jovsky's notion of type coercion, because it does not account for some linguistic phenomena that seem to show that the objects of coercing verbs actually do not assume an event type. The data proposed by Godard and Jayez involve anaphora, relativization, and coordination (or copredication), three syntactic constructions which require the nouns involved to belong to the same type. For an example, take sentence (40):

(40) Jean a commencé son livre à 10 heures et ne l'a pas quitté de la nuit. Jean began his book at ten and did not leave it all night.

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This is a case of anaphora, which, according to Godard and Jayez, generally requires the antecedent noun and the following pronoun to belong to the same type. In French, quitter (to leave) requires a complement of the object type and cannot take an event type: see e.g. quitter la table (to leave the table) vs. *quitter sa lecture (to leave one's reading: see Godard and Jayez, 1993, 169). This and other examples seem to prove that there is no actual semantic type shift in expressions such as commencer le livre (begin the book). As an alternative, Godard and Jayez propose that the semantics of verbs like begin should be enriched by specifying that they may combine both with events and objects. The interpretation of the object argument in these cases may be derived from qualia roles, but this is a distinct process from that of coercion and may very well be in the domain of pragmatics rather than semantics. The goal of a semantic description of logical metonymy, in Godard and Jayez's view, is to describe the semantic constraints which make it so that coercion can be applied only to some kinds of objects. Such constraints are verb-specic and may derive from the semantics of the verbs themselves. These constraints also inuence the subsequent event interpretation of the object. For example, commencer can only occur with NPs which refer to a bounded entity; and the resulting interpretation must be one where the subject of commencer is an intentional controller who modies the object in some way (Godard and Jayez, 1993, 172): commencer le tunnel cannot be interpreted as to begin to go through the tunnel, but only as to begin to build the tunnel.

Another objection to Pustejovsky's approach to coercion (see e.g. Briscoe et al., 1990; Lascarides and Copestake, 1998; Verspoor, 1997) is based on the fact that the qualia-based event interpretation of the object is not the only in-terpretation available, and may in fact be overridden if a dierent inin-terpretation is inferred from the context. There are almost no limits on such contextually-derived interpretations. For example, take a sentence like (41):

(41) The goat enjoyed the book.

It is impossible to derive either a reading or a writing interpretation for book in this sentence, because goats can't read or write. Instead, a plausible in-terpretation may be that the goat enjoyed chewing or eating the book. As a consequence of this and similar data, Lascarides and Copestake (1998) argue that a purely lexical account of the phenomenon (such as the one originally pro-posed by Pustejovsky) is inadequate. On the other hand, a purely pragmatic approach would not account for the fact that most logical metonymies do have a conventional (or default) interpretation. Lascarides and Copestake argue that logical metonymy is partially conventionalized; as such, it must be explained by both lexical semantics and pragmatic interpretation. They propose a formalized approach which describes the interaction between lexical semantics and prag-matics: the lexicon contains information on the conventional interpretation of nouns in a coercion context, based on the telic or agentive quale, in the form of defaults (which are defeasible). The pragmatic component then operates on such default interpretations, maintaining them when there is no conicting contextual information and eliminating them when that kind of information is

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present. As I have mentioned above in my discussion of the GL account of regular polysemy (p. 14), in later works Pustejovsky himself integrated this perspective into the GL framework, thus accepting the objection.

Corpus studies by Briscoe et al. (1990) and Verspoor (1997) support the view of logical metonymy as partially conventionalized. The study by Briscoe et al., conducted on the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen) corpus found that on average 17% of interpretations for logical metonymies involving the verbs enjoy, prefer, nish, start, begin, miss and regret deviate from qualia-related inter-pretations, while Verspoor's study (based on the British National Corpus, or BNC) found that the event interpretations for objects of the verbs begin and nish are determined by qualia roles (mostly the telic and agentive quale) in about the 95% of the surveyed cases, and by the context in the remaining 5%. Similar results have also recently been found for German in a study by Rüd and Zarcone (2011). This study, which was conducted on the deWaC corpus, found that event interpretations for the objects of geniessen (enjoy), anfangen, beginnen (begin), aufhören, and beenden (nish) are based either on their telic or their agentive quale from 83% to 100% of the cases, depending on the verb.

2.4 Approaches in Cognitive Linguistics

I will begin this section by briey discussing a work which predates the birth of Cognitive Linguistics by several years, but which presents an approach to metonymy and metaphor which has much in common with the cognitive lin-guistic perspective on language: Jakobson's Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances (Jakobson, 1971). In this study, Jakobson de-scribes the use of language in terms of two opposite poles, a metaphorical and a metonymic one. Each pole reects one aspect of the organization of linguis-tic knowledge: on the one hand, linguislinguis-tic entities at all levels are organized in terms of similarity, the basis of metaphorical relations according to tradition; on the other hand, the actual realization of language in communication involves putting linguistic entities in a relation of contiguity, which is traditionally asso-ciated with metonymic relations. When producing speech, we select linguistic units from a similarity-based inventory and then combine them into units of a higher degree of complexity, often according to established patterns of contigu-ity. Jakobson uses this pattern to analyze dierent cases of aphasia, suggesting that they can be divided into two classes: similarity disorder and contigu-ity disorder, depending on which of the two poles is most severely impaired. The analysis in terms of metaphorical and metonymical poles is also extended to literature and other semiotic systems, such as gurative art or lms. This view of metaphor and metonymy as conceptual systems that underlie not just language, but various forms of human expression and human cognition in gen-eral, anticipates the approach to the study of tropes that is typical of Cognitive Linguistics.

One of the rst treatments of metonymy from a cognitive linguistic perspec-tive can be found in Lako and Johnson's seminal work Metaphors we live by

Towards a linguistic definition of metonymy

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Contents