On the view put forth by Pustejovsky (1991, pustejovsky:95a), the core lexical semantic components of a word's meaning are captured by several roles in a structure called qualia structure. Four essential aspects of a word's meaning are assumed to be represented:
The roles in qualia structure relevant to logical metonymy are the telic and agentive roles, as these two roles can specify eventualities involving the entity which is the denotation of the noun in the NP complement of an eventive verb. In particular, the telic role captures the activity which is normally performed on/with the entity and the agentive role reflects the activity which brings the entity into existence.
In the examples beg27-beg28 introduced at the start of this chapter, the qualia structure associated with the noun book thus must provide events which can serve as the appropriate interpretation of the logical metonymy sentences. The TELIC role of book would be reading, while the AGENTIVE role would be writing. Either of these two events could be picked out by the verb to provide the missing event needed for interpretation in the coercion process.
The existing approaches assume that all concrete nouns always have both the telic and agentive roles specified, and thus the eventualities specified there are always available to the process of type coercion when establishing the interpretation of a logical metonymy structure. No other interpretations will be available (if the discourse context is not take into consideration), correctly ruling out the specified interpretations of the sentences cog2, since the desired eventualities do not fill a role in the qualia structure of the nominal objects.
John began the stone (*moving) / the book (*destroying) / the desert (*crossing)