Metonymy as a Cross-lingual Phenomenon 
 
Wim Peters 
NLP Group 
Department of Computer Science 
University of Sheffield 
Regent Court 
211 Portobello Street 
Sheffield S1 4DP 
U.K. 
w.peters@dcs.shef.ac.uk 
 
 
Abstract 
The question of whether metonymy carries across languages has always been interesting for language 
representation and processing. Until now attempts to answer this question have always been based on 
small-scale analyses. With the advent of EuroWordNet (Vossen 1998), a multilingual thesaurus covering 
eight languages and organized along the same lines as WordNet (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/) 
we have a unique opportunity to research this question on a large scale. In this paper we systematically 
explore sets of concepts comprising possible metonymic relations that have been identified in WordNet. 
The sets of concepts are evaluated, and a contrastive analysis of their lexicalization patterns in English, 
Dutch and Spanish is performed. Our investigation gives insight into the cross-linguistic nature of 
metonymic polysemy and defines a methodology for dynamic extensions of semantic resources. 
 
 
1. Introduction 
 
Viewed traditionally, metonymy is a non-
literal figure of speech in which the name of 
one thing is substituted for that of another 
related to it. It has been described as a 
cognitive process in which one conceptual 
entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to 
another conceptual entity (Radden 1999). In 
its basic form, it establishes a semantic 
relation between two concepts that are 
associated with word forms. The semantic 
shift expressed by the relation may or may 
not be accompanied by a shift in form. The 
semantic relation that is captured by 
metonymy is one of semantic contiguity, in 
the sense that in many cases there are 
systematic relations between metonymically 
related concepts that can be regarded as slots 
in conceptual frames (cf. Fillmore 1977).   
  For example, in the sentence ‘The colonies 
revolted against the crown.’ crown is used as 
a symbol for the monarchy as well as 
denoting the traditional head ornament worn 
by the monarch.  As the example above 
shows, polysemy is a common way in which 
metonymically related concepts manifest 
themselves in language.  
  It is to be expected that any systematic 
semantic relations between concepts 
expressed by these sense distinctions are 
lexicalized, i.e. they are explicitly listed in 
dictionaries and independent of a pragmatic 
situation. For example, university is on the 
one hand an institution and on the other a 
building. The semantic relation between the 
two senses is ‘is housed in’. 
  Regular polysemy is a subset of metonymy 
that covers the systematicity of the semantic 
relations involved. It can be defined as a 
subset of metonymically related senses of 
the same word displaying a conventional as 
opposed to novel type of semantic contiguity 
relation. This relation holds for related 
senses of two or more words (Apresjan, 
1973), i.e. is a lexicalized pattern, not a 
nonce formation (a pragmatically defined 
novel metonymy), and can therefore be 
called regular. It is this subtype of 
metonymy that we concentrate on in this 
paper. 
 
 
2. Regular polysemy across languages 
 
The question whether regular polysemy is a 
cross-linguistic phenomenon has until now 
only been approached by small scale 
analyses. 
  For instance, Kamei and Wakao (Kamei, 
1992) approached the question from the 
perspective of machine translation and 
conducted a comparative survey of the 
acceptability of metonymic expressions in 
English, Chinese and Japanese consisting of 
25 test sentences. The results they report 
show that in some cases English and 
Japanese share metonymic patters to the 
exclusion of Chinese, but that in others 
English and Chinese team up.  
(Seto1996) performed a study into the 
lexicalization of the container-content 
schema in various languages (Japanese, 
Korean, Mongolian, Javanese, Turkish, 
Italian, Germanic and English).  This pattern 
is lexicalized in English by ‘kettle’: 
1. A metal pot for stewing or boiling; 
usually with a lid 
2. The quantity a kettle will hold 
His observation was that the pattern is 
observable in all languages, and can be 
considered cross-linguistic. This small study 
seems to indicate that the regular polysemic 
pattern extends over language family 
boundaries to such an extent that it almost 
seems universal. This could suggest that the 
pattern is rooted in general human 
conceptualisation, and reflects an important 
non-arbitrary semantic relation between 
concepts or objects in the world. Indeed, if 
we describe the relation between container 
and content in terms of Aristotle’s qualia 
structure (Pustejovsky 1995), we see that it 
is the function of a container to hold an 
object or substance (telic role) and that a 
container is normally brought into existence 
for this purpose.  
  More small-scale studies like the ones 
described above have been performed, 
mostly relying on introspection and small-
scale dictionary analysis. A limited number 
of patterns that are valid in more than one 
language have been identified such as 
container/content and producer/product 
(Peters 2000). With the availability of 
WordNet and EuroWordNet it has become 
possible to investigate the cross-linguistic 
nature of metonymy on a large scale. 
 
 
3. EuroWordNet 
 
EuroWordNet (EWN) (Vossen 1997; Peters 
1998) is a multilingual thesaurus 
incorporating wordnets from eight 
languages: English, Italian, Dutch, German, 
Spanish, French, Czech, Estonian. The 
wordnets have been built in various ways. 
Some of them have been created on the basis 
of language specific resources and matched 
onto the original Princeton WordNet 
(Fellbaum 1998) when the interlingual 
relations were created. They therefore reflect 
the language specific lexicalization patterns 
and semantic organization. Others have been 
built from the start on the basis of a match 
between WordNet and bilingual dictionaries. 
In this case the conceptual structure is less 
language specific but can be regarded as the 
conceptual overlap between the structure of 
the English WordNet and the ontological 
structure associated with that particular 
language. 
  EuroWordNet gives us for the first time the 
opportunity to examine the question of the 
language independence of regular polysemy 
in a more systematic and automatic way. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
4. Methodology 
 
The following methodology has been 
followed: 
  First, the hierarchy of WordNet1.6 was 
analysed in order to obtain English 
candidates for regular polysemic patterns 
(section 4.1). Then a process we call lexical 
triangulation was applied to these data 
within EuroWordNet (section 4.2). The 
results were then manually evaluated. 
 
 
4.1 Automatic candidate selection 
 
A technique was developed (Peters 2000) 
for identifying sense combinations in 
WordNet where the senses involved 
potentially display a regular polysemic 
relation, i.e. where the senses involved are 
candidates for systematic relatedness.  
In order to obtain these candidate patterns 
WordNet (WN) has been automatically 
analysed by exploiting its hierarchical 
structure. Wherever there are two or more 
words with senses in one part of the hierar-
chy, which also have senses in another part 
of the hierarchy, then we have a candidate 
pattern of regular polysemy. The patterns 
are candidates because there seems to be an 
observed regularity for two or more words. 
This follows the definition of (Apresjan 
1973) mentioned in the introduction. 
An example can be found in Figure 1 below. 
 
fabric       covering  hypernym combination  
(something made by weaving or   (a natural object that covers or envelops) 
felting or knitting or crocheting natural or  
synthetic fibers)  
 
 
 
    fleece  words whose senses occur under both hypernyms 
    hair 
    tapa 
    wool 
 
Figure 1: words in WordNet covered by the pattern fabric/covering 
 
We have restricted our experiments to cases 
where the related meanings are of the same 
syntactic class (nouns). The procedure does 
not discover all regular polysemy rela tions, 
because the outcome is heavily dependent 
on the consistency of the encoding of these 
regularities in WordNet.  
 
4.2 Lexical triangulation 
 
In order to determine whether regular 
polysemy is indeed a cross-linguistic 
phenomenon, one needs to compare 
languages, preferably from different 
language families. 
  Data will depend heavily on vocabulary 
coverage in various languages, and until the 
advent of EuroWordNet no serious lexical 
data sets were available for analysis. The 
EuroWordNet database is the most 
comprehensive multilingual thesaurus to 
date. This resource not only provides us with 
an appropriate amount of lexical information 
in terms of vocabulary coverage, but also 
has the additional advantages that its 
taxonomic building blocks are identical for 
all languages involved and the language 
specific concepts are all linked to an 
interlingua which is based on the full set of 
the original Princeton WordNet  (version 
1.5), and is referred to as the interlingual 
index (ILI). 
  We started with a comparative analysis of 
Germanic and Romance languages. The 
main reason for this is that the size of the 
corresponding wordnets is large enough to 
yield significant results. For our analysis we 
used three languages: English, Dutch and 
Spanish, hence the term for this process: 
lexical triangulation.  
  Singling out areas where three language-
specific lexicalization patterns converge 
enabled us to identify metonymic patterns 
that supported the hypothesis that certain 
metonymic relationships have a higher 
degree of universality. 
  We extracted the sense combinations of 
Spanish and Dutch words that participate in 
any of the potential regular polysemic 
patterns from the initial large set described 
in section 4.1. In other words, we 
concentrate here on lexicalization patterns in 
three different languages: sense 
combinations that are lexicalized by one 
language-specific word in English, Spanish 
and Dutch. 
  The first step in this process was the 
reduction of the search space for regular 
polysemic patterns in EuroWordNet. First 
we determined the conceptual overlap for 
nouns between the English, Dutch and 
Spanish wordnets. Table 1 below shows the 
number of nouns in the three wordnets 
involved.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Table 1: conceptual coverage of English, Dutch and Spanish wordnets 
 
 
 
  The conceptual overlap between these 
wordnets is computed simply by 
determining the intersection of ILI noun 
concepts covered by each of the wordnets. 
The total overlap is 17007 ILI concepts.    
There are 920 English polysemous nouns 
with two senses or more within synsets 
linked to this set of ILI concepts. Their 
senses have identical language specific 
lexicalizations in Spanish and Dutch. For 
example, the English word church has one 
sense that is a building and another that is an 
institution. The same sense distinctions 
apply to the Spanish iglesia and the Dutch 
kerk.  The senses in the different wordnets 
are linked through the ILI concepts by 
means of equivalence synonymy or near-
synonymy relations (Vossen 1997).  
  The second step was to map these noun 
senses onto the results from the wordnet 
analysis described in section 4.1, and then to 
evaluate the cross-linguistic validity of the 
regular 
polysemic patterns that have been projected 
from the English monolingual wordnet onto 
the Dutch and Spanish wordnets. 
 
 
5. Evaluation 
 
The cross-linguistic filter yields a subset of 
the monolingual analysis data described in 
section 4.1. It covers 404 distinct English 
nouns out of a total of 8062 (5%). 
  This original filter considered nouns 
satisfying the criteria of Apresjan  (cf. 
section 1), i.e. they are one of at least 2 
words with sense distinctions that exhibit a 
particular relationship. 
  The percentage covered by the cross-
linguistic data compared to the original 
analysis gradually varies from a 100% for 
the very small potential classes of regular 
polysemy (2-3 words) to 1-2% for middle 
sized (30-50 words) and large classes (100+ 
words). 
  In order to create a set for manual 
evaluation, the set of 404 English nouns was 
reduced by strengthening the Apresjan 
criterion and requiring that a word be 
considered only if it was one of at least a 
three word set illustrating the regular 
polysemy (RP). We will refer to this as a 
three-word RP class. The rationale behind 
this was that two word candidate RP classes 
introduce noise because of the increased 
language Number of 
noun synsets 
Number of 
corresponding ILI 
concepts 
English 66025 66025 
Dutch 28352 26779 
Spanish 24073 24087 
probability of a fortuitous coincidence of 
senses belonging to a set of just two words. 
This step reduced the number of 
participating words to 394. At this point, 
177 words were randomly chosen from this 
set for manual evaluation.  The evaluation 
consisted of examining the hypernym pairs 
that reflect a candidate regular polysemic 
relation.1  The criteria used in this step are 
semantic homogeneity (the semantic relation 
that defines the candidate RP class should 
apply to the majority of the participating 
words) and specificity of the pattern (the 
lower the position of the hypernymic pair in 
the hierarchy, the more specific the semantic 
relation). 
 109 of these words displayed valid regular 
polysemic patterns (62%), 68 did not (38%). 
This means that by means of this automatic 
filtering method we have a 62% success rate 
for identifying valid regular polysemic 
patterns. Below are a few examples of cross-
linguistic RP classes that have satisfied the 
criteria of the evaluation. 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Control (the activity of 
managing or exerting control over 
something) – Trait (a distinguishing feature 
of one's personal nature) 
English RP class (7 total): abstinence, 
sobriety, inhibition, restraint, self-control, 
self-denial, self-discipline 
Dutch RP class (2 total): zelfcontrole, 
onthouding 
Spanish RP class (3 total): autodiscipline. 
abstinencia, abnegación, inhibición 
Coverage of the intersection between all 
three languages: 36% of set derived from 
WordNet 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Fabric (something made 
by weaving or felting or knitting or 
                                                                 
1 A complication arises because many 
combinations of hypernym pairs can be 
considered for the same set of words.  (In fact the 
possibilities are the Cartesian product of the 
ancestors of each of  the hypernyms in the pair). 
If all hypernymic combinations were taken into 
account this amounts to an average of 17 classes 
per word. 
 
crocheting natural or synthetic fibers) - 
Covering (a natural object that covers or 
envelops) 
English Rp class (4 total): wool, hair, 
fleece, tapa 
Dutch RP class (1 total): wol 
Spanish RP class (1 total): lana 
Coverage of the intersection between all 
three languages: 25% of set derived from 
WordNet 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Plant (a living organism 
lacking the power of locomotion) - Edible 
fruit (edible reproductive body of a seed 
plant especially one having sweet flesh) 
English RP class (159 total): apple, 
boxberry, blackcurrant, banana, fig . . . 
Dutch RP clas s (9 total): banaan, vijg, 
persimoen, meloen… 
Spanish RP class (20 total): banana, 
plátano, melón, caqui, higo… 
Coverage of the intersection between all 
three languages: 2.5% of set derived from 
WordNet 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Person (a human being) 
- Quality (an essential and distinguishing 
attribute of something or someone) 
English RP class (11 total): attraction, 
authority, beauty, . . . 
Dutch RP class (1 total): schoonheid 
Spanish RP class (4 total): 
belleza,atracción, autoridad, imagen 
Word intersection between all three 
languages: 9% of set derived from WordNet 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Substance (that which 
has mass and occupies space) - Drug 
(something that is used as a medicine or 
narcotic) 
English RP class (25 total): alcohol, 
bromide, dragee, histamine, iodine, liquor… 
Dutch RP class (2 total): broom, cocktail 
Spanish RP class (10 total): bromuro, 
histamina, muscatel, yodo… 
Word intersection between all three 
languages: 4% of set derived from WordNet 
 
Hypernymic Pair: Occupation (the 
principal activity in your life) – Discipline  
(a branch of knowledge) 
English RP class (6 total): architecture, 
literature, politics, law, theology, interior 
design 
Dutch RP class (1 total): architectuur 
Spanish RP class (2 total): arquitectura, 
teología 
Word intersection between all three 
languages: 16% of set derived from 
WordNet 
 
6. Universality of regular polysemy 
 
  It is possible to view these results as an 
indication of the cross-linguistic validity of 
the regular polysemic patterns and their 
level of universality relative to the language 
families represented by the wordnets. The 
hypothesis is that if a metonymic pattern 
occurs in several languages, there is stronger 
evidence for a higher level of universality of 
the regular polysemic pattern.  
  Of course there is interference with the 
coverage of the wordnets in EuroWordNet. 
Since the Dutch and Spanish wordnets are 
only half the size of the English wordnet 
only limited coverage can be expected. Still, 
the coverage seems to be consistently low in 
most cases, often not more than 2-5%. On 
the basis of wordnet size only one would 
expect a higher coverage. 
There are other explanations for the lack of 
identical lexicalizations in other target 
language wordnets: 
 
1. The metonymic pattern is language 
specific, and is not realised as a 
polysemous word in the target language. 
For example, the Dutch kantoor is 
synonymous to the English office in the 
sense ‘where professional or clerical 
duties are performed’, but its sense 
distinctions can not mirror the regular 
polysemic relation in English with ‘a job 
in an organization or hierarchy’. 
 
2. The pattern is unattested in the target 
language in terms of usage but forms a 
potential sense extension in that 
language. For instance, the Spanish 
iglesia and the Dutch kerk both mean 
‘building for worship’ and ‘a service 
conducted in a church’. The Spanish 
wordnet has an additional systematically 
related sense for iglesia (‘institution to 
express belief in a divine power’) that is 
not shared by its Dutch counterpart but 
is a valid new sense. 
 
3. The missing sense can in fact only be 
lexicalized by another word or 
compound or derivation related to the 
word with the potentially missing sense. 
For example, the Dutch vereniging has 
the sense (an association of people with 
similar interests). The English 
equivalent is club, for which there is 
another sense in Wordnet (a building 
occupied by a club). This is not a 
felicitous sense extension for the Dutch 
vereniging, because the favoured 
lexicalization is the compound 
verenigingshuis (club house). 
 
4. The metonymic pattern is in fact attested 
in the language, but one or more senses 
participating in the patterns has not yet 
been captured in the wordnet. One of the 
reasons could be the sense granularity of 
the resource on the basis of which the 
wordnet has been built. For example , 
embassy has one sense in WordNet (a 
building where ambassadors live or 
work). The Dutch translational 
equivalent ambassade has an additional 
sense denoting the people representing 
their country. This sense can be 
projected to the English WordNet as a 
regular polysemy pattern that is also 
valid in English. In fact, LDOCE 
(Procter,1978) only lists the sense which 
is missing in WordNet. 
 
7. Coverage and extendibility  
 
  There are many RP classes whose English 
word members do not all have a Dutch or 
Spanish counterpart. We wanted to evaluate 
the universality of the regular polysemic 
relations by testing native speaker intuitions 
about these regular polysemic gaps. This 
was done by projecting the senses of the 
participating English words in an RP class 
onto Dutch and Spanish, and to assess 
whether the missing senses were adequate 
additional senses in these two languages. 
  The experiment we conducted was very 
small. We intend to perform more 
experiments of this kind in the future. The 
pattern we examined is the hypernymic 
combination  
occupation (the principal activity in your 
life) – discipline  (a branch of knowledge). 
This RP class has five members. Two Dutch 
and two Spanish native speakers were asked 
to judge the felicitousness of the senses that 
are missing in the Dutch and Spanish 
wordnets. Below is a short discussion of 
each member. 
 
interior design 
1. the trade of planning the layout and 
furnishings of an architectural interior 
2. the branch of architecture dealing with the 
selection and organization of furnishings for 
an  architectural interior 
 
The corresponding Dutch word 
binnenhuisarchitectuur has only one sense 
which is linked to both WordNet senses by 
means of a near-synonymy relation. This 
means that the Dutch wordnet is 
underspecified for the distinction of these 
metonymically related senses and can be 
extended with the specific sense distinctions 
(see explanation 4 above). This coincided 
with the verdict of the Dutch jury. 
The Spanish WordNet has a separate 
translation for each sense: interiorismo 
(corresponding to interior design 1) and 
deseno de interiores (corresponding to 
interior design 2). The latter translational 
equivalent was considered to also have a 
possible trade reading. 
 
law 
1. the learned profession that is mastered by 
graduate study in a law school and that is 
responsible for the judicial system 
4. the branch of philosophy concerned with 
the law 
 
  The Dutch ‘rechtswetenschap’ has only 
one sense, which is linked to both WordNet 
senses by means of a near-synonymy 
relation. This again means that the Dutch 
wordnet is underspecified for the distinction 
of these metonymically related senses and 
can be extended with the specific sense 
distinctions (see explanation 4 above). This 
coincided with the verdict of the Dutch jury. 
The Spanish equivalent of law 4 is 
jurisprudencia, whereas law 1 does not have 
a correspondence in the Spanish wordnet. 
The profession reading was not considered a 
felicitous additional sense for this word. 
Both subjects remarked that another word 
captures both meaning: leyes, which is not 
present in the Spanish wordnet. 
 
literature:  
1. the profession or art of a writer 
2. the humanistic study of a body of 
literature 
 
  The Dutch letterkunde is only linked up to 
sense literature no. 2. Sense no. 1 was not 
considered to be a straightforward new sense 
for this word by the judges. 
  The Spanish literatura lacks a profession 
reader in the Spanish wordnet. This sense 
was considered as valid by one subject, but 
rejected by the other subject. 
 
politics 
1. the profession devoted to governing and 
to political affairs 
2. the study of government of states and 
other political units 
 
  The Dutch word politicologie also has only 
one sense that is linked to both WordNet 
senses by means of a near-synonymy 
relation. This again means that the Dutch 
wordnet is underspecified for the distinction 
of these metonymically related senses and 
can be extended with the specific sense 
distinctions. The Dutch subjects, however, 
were not happy with the profession reading. 
  The Spanish política lacks a profession 
reading in the Spanish wordnet. The Spanish 
subjects considered this a valid sense for this 
word. 
 
theology 
1. the learned profession acquired by 
specialized courses in religion (usually 
taught at a college or seminary 
2. the rational and systematic study of 
religion and its influences and of the nature 
of religious truth 
 
The Dutch theologie has no profession 
reading. This reading was considered valid 
by the Dutch subjects. 
  The Spanish teología has both senses in the 
Spanish wordnet, and this coincides with the 
subjects’ intuition. 
 
  The results are summarized in table 2 
below. Overall, the projection of the word 
senses onto the Dutch wordnet yields a 
sense extension for one word out of a 
possible two. For the Spanish wordnet the 
same process creates valid new senses for 
two out of four words.  
 
 
 
 
Table 2: experimental results summary 
 
 
 
8. Conclusion 
 
We have described a methodology for 
systematically and automatically 
investigating the question of whether or not 
certain kinds of metonymic relationships 
hold across languages. We used 
EuroWordNet as the test bed for this 
investigation, although the technique is not 
limited to EuroWordNet and will apply to 
any multilingual resource that captures 
hypernymic relationships and has some 
notion of correspondences among 
languages. Our manual evaluation shows 
regular polysemy patterns to be valid across 
the three languages examined, and indicates 
that regular polysemy has a certain level of 
universality. Also, the results of the 
experiment indicate a potential for 
enhancing the semantic compatibility and 
consistency of wordnets. Wordnets are 
automatically extendable on the basis of 
regular polysemic information available 
from other wordnets. In our small 
experiment 50% of the Dutch and Spanish 
words that do not display a WordNet-
derived regular polysemic pattern were 
successfully semantically enriched with this 
pattern. Future work will involve further 
experimentation. 
 
Acknowledgement 
This work was supported by the UK 
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research 
Council under grant M73521 (MALT). 
 
 
 Senses 
available in 
NL 
Sense 
possible in 
NL 
Senses 
available in 
ES 
Sense 
possible in 
ES  
interior 
design 
lumped into 
one sense 
+ - + 
law lumped into 
one sense 
+ - - 
literature - - - +/- 
politics lumped into 
one sense 
- - + 
theology - + + + 

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