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<Paper uid="W98-0614">
  <Title>The Role of Cardinality in Metonymic Extensions to Nouns</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="104" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Approaches to Metonymy
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Metonymy belongs to a variety of natural language phenomena that contribute to expressing information in an effective and economic way. All these phenomena involve what has been termed 'transfers of meaning' by (Nunberg, 1995), i.e., the meaning of some constituent does not correspond to what can usually be expected according to the syntactic and semantic environment. Metonymy, or semantic coercion, is usually defined as a figure of speech in which the speaker is &amp;quot;using one entity to refer to  another that is related to it&amp;quot; (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). For example, in the utterance &amp;quot;The ham sandwich is waiting for his check&amp;quot;, it is not literally the ham sandwich, which wants to pay, but the person who ordered it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Motivations to address metonymy include both theoretical insights and practical applications (cf. (MACDOW 1992) and the natural language database interface TEAM (Grosz et al.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 1987)). Computational approaches are mostly concerned with inferring implicitly expressed metonymic relations in English texts - (Fass 1991), Hobbs (Hobbs et al. 1993) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), (Nunberg 1993, 1995), (Pustejovsky 1991), and (Wilks 1975) are prominent representatives. Some analyses also consider French (Kayser 1988), (Pustejovsky and, Bouillon 1995) and German (Horacek 1996).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In his program met*, (Fass 1991) makes use of formal definitions of several kinds of metonymic relations; met* also allows chaining metonymic relations in order to fill in implicitly expressed knowledge. Sowa's conceptual graphs (Sowa 1992) are used for inserting an unknown relation between a concept of the type expected and the concept appearing on the surface, which is later filled on the basis of world knowledge accessible to the system. The TACITUS system (Hobbs, Martin 1987) uses similar methods for dealing with metonymy and for interpreting noun-noun components, which are considered special cases of reference resolution - that approach, which is also described in (Hobbs et al. 1993), treats interpretation as a uniform abduction process to find the best explanation for the observables'. These approaches work nicely for analyzing utterances of the kind considered by inserting a plausible relation to remove a constraint violation, and they have similar and characteristic properties: * The conditions expressing when leaving a metonymic relation implicit or not is possible are too unconstrained to cover a larger number of examples in several languages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * The entities involved, the real and the literal referent, always appear in singular form.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> There are only two approaches which in some aspects deviate from this characterization:</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="103" end_page="104" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
* Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon (Puste-
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> jovsky 1991) addresses the first aspect. He proposes a Theory of Qualia within a Generative Lexicon, which enables the explanation of systematic polysemy.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Applying type coercion enables one to arrive at cases of ordinary metonymy which can be grounded in terms of the semantics of lexemes, as well as at word senses which Pustejovsky has termed logical metonymy, like the reading of a book in the sentence &amp;quot;Mary enjoyed the book&amp;quot;. Enhancing the semantic representation of a noun within such contexts is done by exploiting prototypical knowledge derived from AGENTIVE or TELIC roles of the lexical entry for 'book', which are prominent roles in the Qualia Structure of lexical entries for nouns. The accuracy of the theory has been extended by the incorporation of restrictions on the productivity of lexemes. Particularities of the Qualia Structure of nouns regulate the acceptability or unacceptability of leaving a metonymic relation implicit in context of the words engaged (McDonald, Busa 1994, Pustejovsky, Bouillon 1995).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> * (Stallard 1993) indirectly addresses the second aspect by taking into account scoping relations and consequences for pronominal reference. He has introduced a distinction between referential and predicative metonymy, depending on whether the actual or the literal argument is accessible for subsequent pronominal reference. This distinction manifests itself in different scope relations that hold between the actual and the literal argument in the corresponding logical forms. Though we do not agree with his usage of scoping and the resulting strict distinction of pronominal accessibility, Stallard's approach to build logical forms has inspired our techniques.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Though neither Pustejovsky's nor Stallard's approach address the role of cardinalities, we show that both of them can be extended accordingly: the Generative Lexicon can be augmented to represent knowledge about cardinality information associated with the semantics of nominals, and techniques similar to those used by Stallard can be set up for building logical forms with more precise cardinality specifications of the metonymically related entities. But before we expose these methods in detail, we prepare the ground for this enterprise by discussing a set of sentences illustrating the phenomena we intend to investigate.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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