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met*: A Method for Discriminating Metonymy and Metaphor by Computer

Summary

Metaphor and metonymy are both non-literal, but they work differently. A metaphor such as a car that "drinks" gasoline casts one thing as another. A metonymy such as a ham sandwich "waiting" for a bill lets one thing refer to another. Earlier theory left the two vaguely defined, and few computational accounts had actually been run. Fass proposes met*, a procedure within Collative Semantics (CS) that sorts semantic relations in short English sentences into four classes: literal, metonymic, metaphorical and anomalous. It is implemented in the program meta5. The tests run in a fixed order:

  • A relation is literal if the verb's preference is satisfied.
  • If the preference is violated, the system tries to infer a conventional substitute (metonymy, possibly chained).
  • If that fails, it looks for a relevant analogy (metaphor).
  • Anything that passes none of these tests is anomalous.

The author presents meta5 as the first working system to recognise both phenomena. The work shows that the distinction can be made operational, though only on a small set of sentences.

Key points

  • The tests mirror Lakoff and Johnson's contrast: metonymy is a "stands for" relation, and metaphor is a "seen as" relation. The method also allows chains of metonymies (Reddy 1979) and metonymy combined with literalness, metaphor or anomaly.
  • The author names only a few comparable running systems: Martin's (1988; 1990) program for metaphor, and TEAM and TACITUS for metonymy.
  • Coverage is narrow. Metonymy is handled only in adjective–noun and subject–verb–object constructions, and metaphor only in subject–verb–object ones.
  • The analogy meta5 finds can be used to look for further shared traits. For "car drinks gasoline", it pairs an animal drinking a drink with a car using gasoline.
  • The name comes from Yorick Wilks: the Unix wildcard "" makes "met" match both "metonymy" and "metaphor".

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Natural language processing

Topics: Idioms & multiword expressions

Institutions

🎓Simon Fraser UniversityBurnaby · Canada8 works · 4 087 citations

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{fass1991met,
  title = {{met*: A Method for Discriminating Metonymy and Metaphor by Computer}},
  author = {Fass, Dan},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1991},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J91-1003/}
}

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