Logical Metonymy in a Distributional Model of Sentence Comprehension

In theoretical linguistics metonymy is defined as the combina- tion of an event-subcategorizing verb with an entity-denoting direct object (e.g., The author began the book), so that the interpretation of the VP requires the retrieval of a covert event (e.g., writing). Psycholinguistic studies have revealed extra processing costs for logical metonymy, a phenomenon generally explained with the introduction of new semantic structure. In this paper, we present a general distributional model for sentence comprehension inspired by the Memory, Unification and Control model by Hagoort (2013, 2016). We show that our distributional framework can account for the extra processing costs of logical metonymy and can identify the covert event in a classification task.