Metonymy As A Cross-Lingual Phenomenon

The question of whether metonymy carries across languages has always been interesting for language representation and processing. Until now attempts to answer this question have always been based on small-scale analyses. With the advent of EuroWordNet (Vossen 1998), a multilingual thesaurus covering eight languages and organized along the same lines as WordNet (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/) we have a unique opportunity to research this question on a large scale. In this paper we systematically explore sets of concepts comprising possible metonymic relations that have been identified in WordNet. The sets of concepts are evaluated, and a contrastive analysis of their lexicalization patterns in English, Dutch and Spanish is performed. Our investigation gives insight into the cross-linguistic nature of metonymic polysemy and defines a methodology for dynamic extensions of semantic resources.