Inferring Covert Events in Logical Metonymies: a Probe Recognition Experiment

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged that the interpretation of logical metonymies involves the interpretation of covert events (begin the book → reading / writing). Whether this implicit content is part of our lexicon or rather derives from general pragmatic inference, it is currently subject of debate. We present results from a probe recognition experiment, providing novel evidence in support of early metonymy processing, consistent with the hypothesis that covert events are retrieved from knowledge of typical events activated by lexical items.

Alessandra Zarcone

Professor of Language Technologies and Cognitive Assistants

Computational linguist with a background in NLP and in psycholinguistics, working on AI, NLP and human-machine interaction.