TWO KINDS OF METONYMY 
David Stallard 
BBN Systems and Technologies 
70 Fawcett Street 
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 
Intemet: stallard@bbn.com 
ABSTRACT 
We propose a distinction between two kinds of 
metonymy: "referential" metonymy, in which the refer- 
ent of an NP is shifted, and "predicative" metonymy, in 
which the referent of the NP is unchanged and the ar- 
gument place of the predicate is shifted instead. Exam- 
ples are, respectively, "The hamburger is waiting for his 
check" and "Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver". 
We also show that complications arise for both types of 
metonymy when multiple coercing predicates are con- 
sidered. Finally, we present implemented algorithms 
handling these complexities that generate both types of 
metonymic reading, as well as criteria for choosing one 
type of metonymic reading over another. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
The phenomenon of semantic coercion, or "metonymy", 
is quite a common one in natural language. In 
metonymy, the actual argument of a predicate is not 
the literal argument, but is instead implicit and related 
to the literal argument through an implicit binary rela- 
tion. For example, in the following utterances, taken 
from Lakoff and Johnson (1980): 
(1) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check 
(2) Nixon bombed Hanoi 
it is not literally the ham sandwich which is doing the 
walling, but rather the person who ordered it, and not 
literally Nixon who is doing the bombing, but rather the 
pilots under his command. The noun phrase - "The ham 
sandwich", "Nixon" - is said to be "coerced" through 
an implicit binary relation to a related object which is 
the actual argument of the predicate. 
Perhaps the most familar definition of metonymy 
from the literature is that it is a figure of speech in 
which the speaker is "using one entity to refer to an- 
other that is related to it" (Lakoff and Johnson,1980). 
This definition is quite commonly held in one form 
or another. (For example, see (Fass,1991), where it 
is directly quoted; also similar definitions in (Puste- 
jovsky,1991), (Hobbs,1988)). But what does it really 
mean? Does it mean that the coerced noun phrase is 
actually an indirect reference to an object different from 
its literal referent? 
If so, then we might expect other linguistic data to 
support this. For example, we might expect subsequent 
anaphora to agree with the "real" referent. And indeed, 
in the following dialogue the intra-sentential pronoun 
"his" and the extra-sentential "he" both agree with the 
indirect reference to the customer, not the the literal 
sandwich: 
(3) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check 
He is getting a little impatient 
But compare the dialogues 
(4) Nixon bombed Hanoi. 
He wanted to force the Communists to negotiate 
(4') Nixon bombed Hanoi 
*They sang all the way back to Saigon 
The dialogue (4) is quite natural, while in (4'), the use 
of "they" to refer to the bomber crews seems ruled out 
- the reverse of what the indirect reference view would 
predict. 
A second problem with the indirect reference view 
is found in certain performative contexts, such as wh- 
questions and imperatives, in which the referent of a 
particular NP is sought by the speaker. If this NP 
is metonymically coerced, we could expect the cor- 
rect response to the utterance to be the indirect refer- 
ence. Consider, the following examples, which are ac- 
tual utterances collected for the DARPA ATIS domain 
(MADCOW,1992), a database question-answering do- 
main about commercial air flights: 
(5) Which wide-body jets serve dinner? 
(6) Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver? 
87 
In ATIS, only flights "fly" or "serve meals" and thus 
both sentences can only be understood metonymically. 
In (5), it is not the jets which serve dinner but the 
flights on the jets, and one plausible constmal is indeed 
that "wide-body jets" is really a reference to flights on 
wide-body jets, and the interpretation of the sentence is 
a request to display the set of these flights. This would 
agree with the indirect reference view. 
In (6), however, the only possible construal seems 
to be that a set of airlines - the airlines offering flights 
from boston to Denver - is being sought. To respond 
to this request with the set of flights from Boston to 
Denver would clearly be absurd. 
We propose a distinction, motivated by such exam- 
ples, between two kinds of metonymy, which we term 
referential and predicative. In referential metonymy, 
the metonymic noun phrase does indeed have an in- 
tended referent related to but different from its literal 
meaning. An example is the noun phrase "the ham 
sandwich" in (1) above, where the actual and intended 
referent is to a related object - the person who ordered 
the sandwhich. In predicative metonymy, however, the 
actual and intended referent of the noun phrase is just 
the literal one, and it is more accurate to say that the 
predicate is coerced (though as we show later, this 
is itself a simplification). An example of predicative 
metonymy is (6) above. 
We also show how both types of metonymy are 
complicated by the presence of multiple predicates that 
require the same coercion of an NP. We present al- 
gorithms for generating the two types of metonymic 
reading that cope with these complexities. Finally, we 
present criteria for determining a preference for one 
type of metonymic reading over another. (We do not, 
however, deal in this paper with the question of how to 
determine which relations to use for coercion, viewing 
this as a separate problem.) 
The examples throughout are taken from the ATIS 
domain, a domain with a pre-established formal concep- 
tual system of categories and relations that utterances 
must be mapped onto. The algorithms presented are im- 
plemented in the DELPIM system (Bobrow et a1,1991), 
which has been ported to that domain and formally eval- 
uated in it. 
The remainder of the paper is organized into the 
following sections: 
Section 2, the next section, formalizes the distinc- 
tion between referential and predicative metonymy by 
giving logical form readings for each, and shows how 
both types of metonymy are globally complicated when 
multiple coercing predicates are considered. 
Section 3 gives an algorithm for generating both 
types of metonymic readings in semantic interpretation 
that handles these global complications. 
Section 4 gives criteria for picking one type of read- 
ing over another 
Finally, section 5 compares our work to previous 
work on metonymy. 
2 METONYMY AND LOGICAL FORM 
In this section we sharpen and formalize our notion of 
referential and predicative metonymy by giving logical 
form readings for the different cases. 
The logical language we use has sortal quantifiers, 
with a special quantifier "WH". A wh question is the 
treated as: 
(7) (wh x S (and (P1 x) (P2 x))) 
which is interpreted as a request to display all members 
of S (the semantic class of the wh-np) which satisfy both 
P1 (the modifiers of the wh-np) and P2 (the predicate 
of the clause). A labeled-argument notation is used for 
clause semantics. 
Now, let us return to the examples of the previous 
section. In (5), the referential metonymic reading of the 
sentence in which flights are sought that serve dinner 
and are on wide-body jets is expressed as: 
(8) Which wide-body jets serve dinner? 
(wh x flights 
(and (exists y jets 
(and (aircraft-of x y) 
(wide-body y))) 
(serve flight-of x 
meal-of dinner))) 
where coercion relation is AIRCRAFT-OF, mapping 
between flights and the aircraft they are on. 
Compare this with the reading for (6), in which 
airlines and not flights are sought: 
(9) Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver? 
(wh x airlines 
(exists y flights 
(and (airline-of y x) 
(fly flight-of y 
orig-of Boston 
dest-of Denver)))) 
88 
The readings of the referential (8) and and the predica- 
tive (9) are in a sense inside-out versions of each other. 
Both have an interpolated quantifier for FLIGHTS that 
is not explicitly present in the utterance but in (8) the 
interpolated is on the outside and is the WH-thing dis- 
played whereas in (9) the interpolated quantifier is on 
the inside, and is merely part of the description of what 
is to be displayed. This, in logical terms, is the crux of 
the referential/predicative distinction. 
Predicative metonymy can be loosely thought of as 
coercion of a predicate argument place, rather than of 
the argument NP itself. It may therefore seem attractive 
to try to formalize this in a directly compositional way 
through some device such as lambda-abstraction. If P 
is the predicate, R the binary relation of coercion, and 
i the argument-number of P to be coerced, the coerced 
version of P might then be defined in such a view as: 
(lambda (zl ..... xi,...z,~) 
(exists y (domain R) 
(and (R y ~i) (P 21 ..... Y,-..~,~)))) 
This is a predicate just like P, except extended by the 
relation R in its i'th argument place to take an object in 
the range of R. Metonymic extension of the predicate 
would be then be an essentially compositional, local 
process, taking place at the juncture of predicate and 
argument and not affecting interpretation elsewhere. 
Unfortunately, such a treatment turns out to give the 
wrong interpretation when multiple predicates requiring 
the same coercion are present. Consider: 
(10a) Which airlines flying from Boston to Denver 
leave at 3 pm? 
(10b) Show airlines flying from Boston to Denver 
leaving at 3 pm 
Both examples are predicative metonymic utterances. 
Airlines neither "fly" nor "leave"; flights do these, so 
both the main verb and the relative clause modifier pred- 
icates require airline-to-flight coercions. If the lambda- 
abstraction scheme is right each predicate-application 
couM be dealt with separately. 
Yet the following reading for 10a, which would 
result from the application of the lambda-abstraction 
scheme to the two predicates, is emphatically not the 
correct reading: 
(11) (wh x airlines 
(and (exists y flights 
(airline-of y x) 
(fly flight-of y 
orig-of Boston 
dest-of Denver)) 
(exists y' flights 
(airline-of y' x) 
(leave flight-of y' 
time-of (3 pro))))) 
These troth-conditions are too weak, as they allow air- 
lines that have a Boston to Denver flight at any time, 
so long as they have another (possibly different) flight 
at 3 pm to any place. The proper reading is instead: 
(12) (wh x airlines 
(exists y flights 
(and (airline-of y x) 
(fly flight-of y 
orig-of Boston 
dest-of Denver) 
(leave flight-of y 
time-of (3 pm))))) 
in which the airline is related to a single flight descrip- 
tion that has all the desired properties. 
Note that the issue here is not that one predicate 
is intemal to the NP and the other external to it. The 
same problem arises with whatever combination of in- 
ternal and external predicates. In 10b, for example, 
both predicates are internal to the NP but if the two 
coercions are carried out seperately the same erroneous 
troth-conditions will result, in which the AIRLINE is 
related to two different FLIGHT descriptions instead of 
one. 
Nor is the "single-interpolation" requirement re- 
lated specifically to the referential\]predicative distinc- 
tion. If we modify one of our referential examples to 
include multiple coercing predicates, as below: 
The ham sandwich at table 12 is impatient 
we see that a correct reading would still require that the 
ham sandwich be related to one and only one interpo- 
lated description of a person that ordered the sandwich, 
is seated at table 12, and is impatient. 
That fact that multiple coercions of the same NP, 
whether internal or external to it, cannot be carried out 
separately means that the phenomenon of metonymy 
takes on a decisively global character, one which is as 
much akin to quantifier scoping as it is to compositional 
89 
semantic interpretation. As we shall see in the next 
section, the quantifier scoping stage of processing is 
exactly where we locate the solution to these problems. 
3 GENERATING THE READINGS 
We now show how referential and predicative 
metonymic readings are generated, and how the require- 
ment of a single interpolate for multiple coercions is 
enforced. 
3.1 Input Representation 
A two-stage mechanism of semantic interpretation is 
used in the DELPHI system. In the first stage, an ini- 
tial predicate-argument level of semantic representation 
is produced, with quantifiers in place. In the second, 
a fully quantified logical form is generated, in which 
quantifiers are pulled out of the predicate-argument rep- 
resentation and placed in their proper relative scope. It 
is in this second stage that the referential/predicative 
distinction is made. 
The first stage of semantic interpretation has been 
described elsewhere in (Bobrow et al,1991), and we do 
not discuss it here except to describe its output, which 
forms the input to the quantification stage. This output 
is a tree of whose nodes are phrasal representation ob- 
jects. Each of these phrasal representation objects has a 
head and a set of bindings. The head includes semantic 
type information (as well as other information such as 
subcategorization etc.), while the bindings represent the 
semantic effects of modifiers on the head. Each binding 
has four parts: 
1. the modifier grammatical relation 
2. the modifier semantic relation 
3. the filler of this semantic relation 
4. a binary coercion relation 
The following is the top-level phrasal representation 
for "Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver?": 
CLAUSE: 
head: fly 
subject: flight-of, (wh airlines), airline-of 
pp: orig-of, Boston, identity 
pp: dest-of, Denver, identity 
This representation has three bindings: a SUBJECT 
and two PP-complements. In the two PP bindings, the 
ranges of the modifier semantic relations ORIG-OF and 
and DEST-OF are both CITY, which agrees with the 
explict fillers BOSTON and DENVER. Thus, in these 
bindings no coercion is needed and the coercion relation 
is just IDENTITY. But in the SUBJECT binding, the 
range of the modifier relation FLIGHT-OF is FLIGHT 
and the explicit filler is an AIRLINE. Here, the coer- 
cion relation AIRLINE-OF is required to bridge the gap 
between FLIGHT and AIRLINE. 
NP semantic representations have the same struc- 
ture, plus a quantifier. Here is the representation for 
"which airline" 
NP: 
head: AIRLINE 
quant: wh 
We refer to the constituent modifier bindings of the NP 
itself as its "intemal" bindings. In this particular exam- 
ple, there are no internal modifiers and thus no internal 
bindings. When an NP is a constituent of a clause (or 
is the object of a PP which is), we call the binding in 
which the NP occurs its "external" binding. 
Semantic representations of this kind are neutral not 
only with respect to quantifier scoping, but to the dis- 
tinction between predicative and referential metonymy 
as well. From the standpoint of the predicate, one can 
think of the coercion relation as extending the given 
argument place of the predicate to take an argument of 
a different type. From the standpoint of the NP argu- 
ment, on the other hand, the coercion can be viewed as 
mapping the NP in the "reverse" direction of the rela- 
tion, from range AIRLINE to domain FLIGHT instead 
of from domain to range. 
3.2 Algorithm 
The alternative metonymic readings are generated from 
these semantic representations as part of the quantifier 
scoping pass. There are two steps. 
Step 1, carded out before quantification begins, is 
to walk the phrasal representation Ixee and build a "co- 
ercion table" relating each nominal head N to the set of 
coercion relations on it: 
R~ - the coercion relation of N's external binding 
R~ - the coercion relations of N's internal bindings 
As a technical convenience, IDENTITY relations in the 
R,,R~ are subscripted with the semantic type restric- 
tion T of the binding in which they occur. This type 
restriction is simply the range of the semantic modifier 
relation in the binding. 
90 
Step 2 is to pull the quantifiers out of this StlUC- 
ture and into their proper places in a complete formula. 
For an NP with a non-IDENTITY entry in the coercion 
relation, alternative WFF-generating schemas are used 
to generate the alternative referential and predicative 
metonymic readings. 
In what follows, let N be the noun phrase under 
consideration and let Q be its quantifier and S its sort. 
Let R be any relation which is not IDENTITY and 
which is one of the coercion relations associated with 
N in the table - whether Re or one of the Ri. 
Now, consider all the internal bindings of N which 
have R as their coercion relation. Let the MR and F~ 
be respectively the semantic modifier relations and cor- 
responding arguments of these bindings. Let the Mo, 
Fo and Ro be, respectively, the semantic modifier re- 
lations, arguments and coercion relations of bindings 
which do not have R as their coercion relation. 
The operation of reading generation is to pick a 
non-IDENTITY R from N's table, and apply the two 
schemas. To generate the predicative reading, the fol- 
lowing schema is used: 
(QxS 
{(Mo x Fo)} 
(exists y (domain R) 
(and (R y x) 
{(MR y FR)}) ***)) 
The token "***" indicates the open slot for the matrix 
predicate of the clause, and the brackets "{","}" are 
shorthand for conjoined iteration over the subscripted 
items within. 
Note that the interpolated EXISTS quantifer has 
scope over the matrix formula of the clause, so it will 
govern any external R coercion for N. Furthermore, be- 
cause all the R coercions are gathered together in this 
scheme, the same quantifier will govern any R coer- 
cions which are internal to the NP. This fufills the re- 
quirement of the previous section: that there be one and 
only one quantifier for a given coercion, even when that 
coercion is needed both by internal modifier relations 
and by the external clause in which the noun phrase is 
contained. 
Use of the schema for our example above generates 
the interpretation: 
Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver? 
(wh x AIRLINE 
(exists y FLIGHT 
(AIRLINE-OF y x) 
(FLY flight-of y 
orig-of Boston 
dest-of Denver))) 
as desired. 
In order to enforce the restriction that subsequent 
anaphora resolve to the literal AIRLINE and not the in- 
terpolated FLIGHT (and, similarly, to "Nixon" instead 
of the pilots in our earlier example) we add a diacritic 
to the interpolated quantifier '(exists y FLIGHT ...)' 
that forbids the discourse component from resolving an 
anaphor to this quantified description. 
The referential metonymic reading is generated by 
a different schema. In order to use this schema, the 
following condition must hold: 
(Re = R) V (Re = IDENTITYT A (domainR) C T) 
This condition ensures that a semantically ill-formed 
expression will not result and simply requires that the 
type requirement of the external binding of the NP to 
be referentially coerced agrees with the coerced ver- 
sion. Either the coercion must be dictated by the ex- 
ternal binding itself, or the external binding's type re- 
quirement must be loose enough to accept the coerced 
version (as in the case of a loosely-typed predicate like 
"show"). 
If these conditions hold, then the following schema 
can be used to produce the referential reading: 
(Q x (domain R) 
(and (exists y S (and {(Ma y Fa)} (R x y)) 
{(Mo x Fo)})) ***) 
Use of the schema generates the following reading for 
our example: 
Which wide-body jets serve dinner? 
(wh x FLIGHT 
(exists y JET 
(and (WIDE-BODY y) 
(AIRCRAFT-OF x y) 
(SERVE flight-of x 
meal-of DINNER)))) 
In principle, of course, a given NP's entry in the 
coercion table can have more than one distinct non- 
IDENTITY coercion relation. Obviously in such a case 
there can be at most one referential coercion of the NP. 
91 
All other coercions to different semantics types must 
then be predicative. In the case of multiple predicative 
coercions, the predicative schema is simply iterated. 
We arbitrarily disallow chains of coercions ("double- 
shifting"), though these in principle could be accomo- 
dated. 
4 DETERMINING THE CORRECT 
READING 
Thus far we have argued for different types of 
metonymic reading and shown how to generate them, 
but have not given any indication of when a given type 
of reading is to be preferred. How do we know, for 
example, that the predicative reading and not the refer- 
ential is correct in (6) "Which airlines fly from Boston 
to Denver"? 
A few criteria are fairly obvious. One we have 
already seen in the previous section: the external- 
binding agreement condition on applying the referen- 
tial metonymy schema. If an NP's external semantic 
context agrees with its literal referent, but not its refer- 
entially coerced version, then referential metonymy is 
ruled out for that N'P. 
A somewhat broader notion of external semantic 
context is found in intra-sentential anaphora: 
The ham sandwich is waiting for HIS check 
Which airline flies to ITS headquarters city? 
Clearly, we would prefer any intra-sentential anaphora 
to agree with the "real" referent of the NP. In the first 
sentence above, the pronoun "his" cannot agree with the 
literal referent, but can agree with the metonymicaUy 
interpolated PERSON, and so provides evidence for the 
referential reading. In the second sentence, the pronoun 
"its" cannot agree in number with the interpolated set 
of FLIGHTs, but can agree with the singular "airline", 
and so provides evidence for the predicative reading. 
Neither of these two criteria addresses example (6), 
however. Our hypothesis is that the real distinction be- 
ing made here is pragmatic. An important principle of 
language use (essentially part of the Gricean Maxim 
of Quantity (Grice,1975)) is that a cooperative speaker 
will avoid adding a part of a description which self- 
evidently adds no constraint to the set of things being 
described. This is the reason why such pleonasms as 
"female woman" sound odd to us, and are not normally 
uttered. In this light, the referential reading of the sen- 
tence above: 
(wh x FLIGHT 
(exists y AIRLINE 
(AIRLINE-OF x y)) 
(FLY flight-of x 
orig-of Boston 
dest-of Denver)) 
has a completely redundant component, since every 
flight is on some airline. Yet this redundant component 
is precisely the one introduced to handle the coercion! 
Encoding the reference in this way has no utility: one 
might as well have said "which flights" to begin with. 
We can formalize this principle as follows. Let 
R be the coercion relation and let S be the literal NP 
referent-set. Then the referential coercion of the NP 
can be written as the pairing (R,S), which describes a 
property on the domain of R that picks out just the 
subset of the domain of R that is obtained by mapping 
S back into the domain in the "reverse" direction of R. 
Such a property is considered vacuous if it provides no 
constraint on the domain, or in other words if: 
R is a total relation and S = (RANGE R) 
holds. A total, or "into", relation is one which maps 
every element of its domain to at least one element of 
its range. Since every flight in ATIS is on an airline, 
AIRLINE-OF is a total relation, and AIRLINE is its 
range, so a referential metonymy is clearly vacuous in 
this case. 
In contrast, the relation AIRCRAFF-OF is total, 
but "wide-body jet" is a proper subclass of its range 
(AIRCRAFT), so this condition does not hold for "What 
wide body jets serve dinner?" and referential metonymy 
is allowed for it. 
Similar pragmatic considerations can be applied 
to rule out predicative metonymy in some cases. If 
a metonymically extended predicate provides no con- 
straint on the NP, then predicative metonymy is the 
less likely reading. Consider again our referential ex- 
ample, "What wide-body jets serve dinner". If this is 
taken predicatively, it would have as its logical form: 
(wh x jet 
(and (wide-body x) 
(exists y flight 
(and (aircraft y x) 
(serve flight-of y 
meal-of dinner))))) 
92 
The class AIRCRAFT in ATIS is really the set of 
aircraft-types, and the same aircraft-type is typically 
used by a large number of flights with nothing par- 
ticularly in common. It therefore seems unlikely that 
the property "(used on flights)that serve dinner" offers 
any constraint on the class AIRCRAFT: in other words, 
that being a particular type of aircraft and being used 
by a flight that serves dinner are correlated in any way. 
This particular judgment, however, is based on human 
knowledge and plausibility, and is difficult to formalize 
given the current state of the art in knowledge repre- 
sentation. 
We have proposed a number of possible theoreti- 
cal criteria for choosing between predicative and refer- 
ential metonymy. It is of some interest, therefore, to 
compare the relative occurences of predicative and ref- 
erential metonymy in actual data. Our study of a large 
(> 5000 sentence) corpus of naturally collected ATIS 
data shows that predicative metonymy is very common. 
Noun phrases headed by "fare", "airline" and "ticket" 
frequently appear in positions that require a flight argu- 
ment. Yet it is clear, both from the meaning of the utter- 
ance, and from the judgements of independent annota- 
tors who pair these sentences with "correct" responses 
for NL system evaluation, that fares and airlines are 
being talked about in such cases, and not flights. 
Indeed, our experiments have shown that allow- 
ing predicative metonymic coercion when evaluating 
DELPHI against this corpus leads to a 27% decrease in 
weighted error over not allowing it. This is very sub- 
stantial difference indeed, and testifies to the importance 
of the metonymy phenomenon in actual data. 
As for the referential type of metonymy, we have 
found only a few cases of it in this corpus. We hy- 
pothesize that the reason for this is that referential 
metonymy, involving as it does an encoding of a ref- 
erence in terms of a categorially different thing, is a 
more marked and unusual event in psychological terms. 
Predicative metonymy, on the other hand, involves no 
such operation, merely the convenient making-way of a 
predicate for a non-standard but related argument. For 
this reason, our work prefers predicative metonymy as 
the default choice in processing when no other evidence 
is present. 
5 COMPARISON WITH PREVIOUS 
WORK, CONCLUSIONS 
metonymy must ultimately be treated as a global phe- 
nomenon over the sentence, part of which belongs 
with quantificational considerations and part with lo- 
cal compositional interpretation. We have shown how 
pragmatic considerations of language use can influence 
which reading is preferred. 
The referential/predicative distinction is not ob- 
served in most of the writing on metonymy, which is 
either not formal and computational in nature (Lakoff 
and Johnson,1980), or is oriented towards different 
types of systems and computational concerns. Hobbs 
(1987,1988), for instance, discusses metonymy along 
with a number of other "local pragmatic" issues (nom- 
inal compounds, etc.), but this work is done in the 
context of a message-processing and not a question- 
anwering system, so many of the issues we have dis- 
cussed (wh-questions, etc.) simply do not arise them. 
Something like the referential/predicative distinc- 
tion does seem to be present, however, in the work of a 
few other authors. For example, Fass (1991) speaks of 
what he calls the "source" or the "target" of a metonymy 
being alternatively substituted for. His sentence repre- 
sentations are not done in a formal logical framework, 
however, so it is difficult to tell if the ambiguity has a 
referential or truth-conditional consequence. 
Closer to our work is that of Pustejovsky (1991). 
He defines a notion he calls "logical metonymy" 
which seems quite close to our notion of predicative 
metonymy. In a sentence like "Mary enjoyed the book", 
logical metonymy changes the type of the verb "en- 
joy" to take an object like "book" which is not an 
event but which is related to one (the reading of the 
book). As we have shown in Section 3, however, the 
single-interpolation requirement for multiple coercing 
predicates poses a technical problem for a verb type- 
changing view which only looks at the given verb and 
argument by themselves. Our work has demonstrated 
that a correct account of metonymic coercion must, in 
the most general case, involve considerations that are 
global over the whole utterance interpretation. 
Our work has also demonstrated an important inter- 
action between appropriateness of metonymic readings 
and the Gricean Maxim of Quantity. To our knowl- 
edge, no other work has done this. Finally, our work 
differs from previous work in the area by having been 
carded out in an environment of objective evaluation, 
an environment whose rigors have pushed us towards 
many of the insights presented here. 
We have argued for a distinction between two types 
of metonymic reading, and have given evidence that 
93 
6 Acknowledgments 
The work reported here was supported by the Advanced 
Research Projects Agency and was monitored by the 
Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N00014- 
92-C-0035. The views and conclusions contained in 
this document are those of the author and should not be 
interpreted as necessarily representing the official poli- 
cies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Ad- 
vanced Research Projects Agency or the United States 
Government. 
I would like to thank James Pustejovsky and Rusty 
Bobrow for valuable comments and discussion. 
Volume 17, Number 1 
March 1991 

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in Proceedings, 10th International Joint Conference on 
Artificial 
Intelligence (IJCAI-87). Milan, Italy 
Fass, Dan met*: A Method for Discrimating Metonymy 
and Metaphor by Computer 
Computational Linguistics 
