compositionality-logical-metonymy-example

Summary

The sentence "John began the book" works even though "began" logically needs an activity, not a physical object, meaning the listener has to silently insert "reading" to make sense of it. This shows that natural language routinely skips pieces that a strictly mechanical, part-by-part meaning builder would require, so any system parsing or reasoning about sentences has to handle these gaps rather than assume every element is spelled out.