Metonymic and Metaphorical Uses of Proper Names

In this paper we describe a research we are carrying out in the framework of ItalWordNet, a large lexical-semantic database containing semantic information for about 50,000 synsets of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and a subset of proper names, which is continuously enriched and updated at the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa. The research concerns the proper names considered from a twofold aspect: their coding in the lexical semantic database and their concrete use, as it is evidenced within a large corpus of the contemporary written Italian language. In particular the semantic relations involving the proper names and their senses (literal, derived and extended) are taken into consideration. Many proper names turn out to be the basis for many extensions of meaning, so in the paper we analyse in the corpus a set of them showing many types of derivates and sense extensions generated by means of lexical rules that operate as "generative factors" (Pustejovsky, 2001). The many contexts of use, analyzed in the corpus, confirm a rich regular polysemy regarding this category of nouns, so, for a set of cases, we propose to represent this phenomenon by introducing specific semantic relations in the database.