How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis

Temuulen Khishigsuren, Gábor Bella, Thomas Brochhagen, Daariimaa Marav, Fausto Giunchiglia, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren


Abstract
Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigtyp-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington
Editors:
Ekaterina Vylomova, Edoardo Ponti, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
SIGTYP
SIG:
SIGTYP
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
96–98
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Temuulen Khishigsuren, Gábor Bella, Thomas Brochhagen, Daariimaa Marav, Fausto Giunchiglia, and Khuyagbaatar Batsuren. 2022. How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 96–98, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis (Khishigsuren et al., SIGTYP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.13.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.13.mp4