Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We challenge the commonly held view that the interpretation of metonymies should proceed from a literal-meaning-first approach and argue for an equally balanced treatment of literal and figurative language use. Resulting ambiguities are handled by a combination of two techniques. First, we incorporate discourse constraints into metonymy resolution, reflecting the systematic interaction patterns between the resolution of nominal anaphora and metonymies. We, second, impose constraints on metonymies that are based on pragmatic criteria.