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<Paper uid="P93-1012">
  <Title>TWO KINDS OF METONYMY</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="87" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The phenomenon of semantic coercion, or &amp;quot;metonymy&amp;quot;, 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 relation. 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 - &amp;quot;The ham sandwich&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Nixon&amp;quot; - is said to be &amp;quot;coerced&amp;quot; through an implicit binary relation to a related object which is the actual argument of the predicate.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Perhaps the most familar definition of metonymy from the literature is that it is 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). 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 (Pustejovsky,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 &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; referent. And indeed, in the following dialogue the intra-sentential pronoun &amp;quot;his&amp;quot; and the extra-sentential &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 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 &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; to refer to the bomber crews seems ruled out - the reverse of what the indirect reference view would predict.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 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 correct response to the utterance to be the indirect reference. Consider, the following examples, which are actual utterances collected for the DARPA ATIS domain (MADCOW,1992), a database question-answering domain about commercial air flights:  (5) Which wide-body jets serve dinner? (6) Which airlines fly from Boston to Denver?  In ATIS, only flights &amp;quot;fly&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;serve meals&amp;quot; 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 &amp;quot;wide-body jets&amp;quot; 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We propose a distinction, motivated by such examples, between two kinds of metonymy, which we term referential and predicative. In referential metonymy, the metonymic noun phrase does indeed have an intended referent related to but different from its literal meaning. An example is the noun phrase &amp;quot;the ham sandwich&amp;quot; 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 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 algorithms 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 conceptual system of categories and relations that utterances must be mapped onto. The algorithms presented are implemented in the DELPIM system (Bobrow et a1,1991), which has been ported to that domain and formally evaluated in it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The remainder of the paper is organized into the following sections: Section 2, the next section, formalizes the distinction 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Section 3 gives an algorithm for generating both types of metonymic readings in semantic interpretation that handles these global complications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Section 4 gives criteria for picking one type of reading over another Finally, section 5 compares our work to previous work on metonymy.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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