Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the relation between conceptual and syntactic structure by focusing on the phenomenon of circumstantial metonymy e.g., “Table #6 wants another pizza”. We hypothesize that the construal of a metonymic interpretation is facilitated when the metonymized argument e.g., “Table #6” is retrieved before the metonymy-trigger e.g., “wants”, since this gives the processor more time to build the event structure that metonymy demands. This predicts greater cost of metonymy composition when the argument is in object position (after the trigger) relative to subject position (before the trigger). An acceptability task shows a main effect of metonymy for both syntactic positions. A self-paced reading task demonstrates a cost for metonymy only in object position. This indicates that the cost of metonymy composition is rooted in the requirement that the conceptual structure for the metonymic argument be fully retrieved, a process constrained by the order of lexical retrieval provided by syntactic structure.