Varying Cardinality in Metonymic Extensions to Nouns

Meaning shifting phenomena such as metonymy have recently attracted increasing interest of researchers. Though these phenomena have been addressed by plenty of computational methods, the impacts of cardinalities of metonymically related items have been widely ignored in all of them. Motivated by this lack of analysis, we have developed a method for representing expectations and knowledge about the cardinalities of metonymically related entities and for exploiting this information to build logical forms expressing metonymic relations, the entities related, and their cardinalities. The representation of lexically motivated knowledge is realized as an enhancement to Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, and the process of building logical forms takes into account overwriting of default information and mismatch of cardinality requirements. Our method enables a precise attachment of sentence complements, and it supports reference resolution in the context of metonymic expressions.