Processing Metonymy and Metaphor

The aim of the book is a semantic theory of metonymy and metaphor, called "collative semantics," and its implementation in the meta5 program. Before entering the core of the topic, Fass gives the reader definitions for some tropes (figures of speech), most, if not all of them, related to metaphor and metonymy (Chapter 2). The tropes are classified according to their nature: comparison, contiguity, contrast, as well as idioms and a few "borderline" tropes. In Chapter 3, types of metaphors and types of metonymies are proposed, and previous work in these domains is presented. The proposed classifications provide the reader with a very clear view of both tropes. Moreover, the author adds to each classification a similarly classified description of the two main processes that can apply to the listed figures: recognition and interpretation. Significant, and valuable, efforts have been made to synthesize and clearly introduce complex notions about figurative language. However, for almost every topic Fass introduces, he concludes by emphasizing its fuzziness. The novice reader may be confused by the overlaps between the different tropes as well as by the lack of precise definitions. At this point of the book, the author introduces the core of his theory. The "collative" semantics is founded on a frame-based language model for representing lexical ambiguity, including both preferences (selection restrictions and constraints on partof-speech for composition) and assertions (constraints on the semantic properties for composition). The frames or "word senses" are nodes organized in an ontology exploiting 12 different kinds of relationships. This representation leads to a description of the different possible semantic relations between two word senses. Fass proposes