Lapata, Mirella, Frank Keller, and Christoph Scheepers. 2003. Intra-sentential Context Effects on the Interpretation of Logical Metonymy. Cognitive Science, 27:4, 651-670.

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoretical work (Pustejovsky 1991, 1995) predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra-sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data.

@Article{Lapata:ea:03,
  author = 	 {Maria Lapata and Frank Keller and Christoph Scheepers},
  title = 	 {Intra-sentential Context Effects on the Interpretation 
                  of Logical Metonymy},
  journal = 	 {Cognitive Science},
  year = 	 2003,
  volume =	 27,
  number =       4,
  pages =        {651--670}
}