Eye movements and semantic composition

s concentrated on the rarer instances of meaning ambiguity, where a word (e.g., bank, coach) has unrelated interpretations (e.g., Swinney, 1979; Rayner & Duffy, 1986). Here, the main focus is on what has traditionally been termed metonymy: Dickens can refer literally to the man or metonymically to his writings, and Vietnam can refer literally to the country or metonymically to the Vietnam War. The second type of expression that we are concerned with is illustrated by began the book, which can mean "began reading the book", "began writing the book", or indeed other things (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1995). Such ambiguities appear to arise when the semantic requirements of the verb are not met by the complement; here, because a verb like began requires a complement that denotes an event, but when the actual complement is a noun phrase that denotes an entity. The processor resolves this problem by inserting relevant semantic content (reading, writing, or whatever) via what has been te