Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Fachrichtung 4.7 Universität des Saarlandes

Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 6 June 2013, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Logical Metonymy Interpretation

Sebastian Padó
Department of Computational Linguistics
Universität Heidelberg

Logical metonymies ("The student finished the beer") arise from the combination of an event-subcategorizing verb with an entity and are typically interpreted by inserting an additional event ("The student finished drinking the beer"). This presents a challenge to compositionality and has led a substantial number studies, both in linguistics (where lexical as well as pragmatic accounts have been posited) and psycholinguistics (where a consistently higher processing cost for metonymic constructions has been found).

I will report on recent experimental work which found an early effect of thematic fit on the time course of logical metonymy interpretation in German. Our results are difficult to explain within purely lexical or pragmatic accounts but make a good match with recent proposals that stress the important role of hearers' knowledge about typical events which is activated by contextual cues and used to build expectations about upcoming material. I will show that a distributional semantic model that incorporates these ideas can account well for the results and finally discuss more generally the status of distributional semantics as evidence in psycholinguistics.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Michaela Regneri.