Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper introduces an approach to modelng the interpretation of semantically underspecified logical metonymies, such as John began the book. A distinctive feature of the theory presented is its emphasis on accounting for their behavior in discourse contexts. The approach dependson the definition of a pragmatic component which interacts in the appropriate manner with lexicosyntactic information to establish the coherence of a discourse. The infelicity of certain logical metonymy constructions in some discourses is shown to stem from the non-default nature of the lexicosyntactically determined interpretation for such constructions. The extent of the influence of contextual information from the discourse on the interpretation of logical metonymies is therefore constrained by the lexical properties of the constituents of the metonymies. Contextually-cued interpretations are shown to be unattainable when indefeasible lexical information conflicts with these interpretations.