FRAME SEMANTICS

Wikipedia: Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore that extends his

earlier case grammar. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopaedic knowledge. The basic idea is that one cannot
understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For
example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial
transfer, which also involves, among other things, a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the
goods, the relations between the seller and the goods and the money, the relation between the buyer and the goods and the
money and so on.

The Frame Semantic Basis

Frame semantics is first of all an approach to the understanding and description of the meanings of lexical
items and grammatical constructions. It begins with the uncontroversial assumption that in order to
understand the meanings of the words in a language we must first have knowledge of the conceptual
structures, or semantic frames, which provide the background and motivation for their existence in the
language and for their use in discourse. We assume that an account of the meaning and function of a
lexical item can proceed from the underlying semantic frame to a characterization of the manner in which
the item in question, through the linguistic structures that are built up around it, selects and highlights
aspects or instances of that frame.

The relation between a frame and a word that appeals to it is very similar to what we find in Ronald
Langacker's distinction between  base and profile. (R. Langacker 1987, Foundations of Cognitive
Grammar, Volume I, Stanford University Press). Langacker's parade example of the distinction uses the
word hypotenuse. Nobody can be said to understand this word who does not first understand the concept
of a right triangle. A description of the relevant features of a right triangle is a description of the frame
against which the word hypotenuse is to be defined. In Langacker's terms, right triangle is the base,
hypotenuse is the profile.

The hypotenuse example, coming as it does from a domain in which meanings are stipulated (nobody
would turn to corpus evidence to find out what the word hypotenuse means) makes it easy to understand
the importance of the relations between frames. The description of right triangle will contain terms that
presuppose an understanding of such deeper background notions as straight line, perpendicularity, closed
geometric figure, angle, etc.

For most purposes of ordinary lexical inquiry, it will not be necessary to reduce a frame description to its
ultimate `primitives'. In the end it will be necessary to express frame notions in some formal knowledge-
representation language which will allow valid inferences to be drawn from frame semantic
representations of sentences, or which can serve in a precise way in the development of a cumulative
representation of the content of an ongoing discourse. But for purposes of ordinary lexicographic inquiry
(and for the purposes of the present project), the language used to describe semantic frames can be limited
to the granularity needed for revealing to human users the essential semantic characteristics of the words
being studied and for tagging all of the arguments and contrasts that we believe are conventionally
associated with them.

In fact, the semantic frames that we need to call on may often refer to entities and experiences that cannot
be given precise formalization at all. These may include certain species-universal experiences (anger,
sleep, recognition of conspecifics, etc.), interactions with the environment (responses to gravity,
recognition of natural kinds, protection from weather conditions, etc.), and cultural universals (nurturance,
speech, etc.) which are presupposed, but not explained, in describing the meanings of words such as smile,
upwards, food, death, pain, cat, etc.
In developing a frame-semantic description, we must first identify the phenomena, experiences, or
scenarios represented by the meanings of the target words and the sentences in which they occur. We must
then identify and assign labels to the parts or aspects of these which are associated with specific means of
linguistic expression. These are what we refer to as frame elements. In the simplest cases, they can be
thought of in terms of the roles that arguments can have in a predicate-argument structure. Although in the
initial stages of inquiry we may be satisfied with labels for frame elements that are obviously ad hoc and
merely mnemonic, we will try, from the start, to choose words for their `reusability', in particular for their
reusability in the description of words in the same semantic domain in different languages.

Using labels for frame elements, we then describe the manner in which a word, in combination with the
constructions in which it occurs, provides information about instances (or possible instances) of the frame
or frames in question.

To make this process clearer, let us consider an example-the Commercial Transaction Frame.

The Commercial Transaction Frame

The commercial transaction frame involves such concepts as possession, change of possession
(giving, taking/receiving), exchange (the parties in the exchange accept and are expected by their
community to accept the results of the exchange), and money (an artefact which the culture has
dedicated to the purpose of exchange and which has no other function). The basic frame
elements, then, will include Money, the Goods (standing for goods or services), the Buyer (the
person who surrenders money in exchange for the goods), and the Seller (the person who
surrenders the goods in exchange for the money). Further elaborations, needed for describing
some of the peripheral terms in this frame, involve certain details of the exchange: in some cases,
for example, we need to identify the Price, a ratio between the quantity of money given and the
quantity of goods received (e.g. two dollars an ounce), temporal features of the exchange
(perhaps the payment is spread over a period of time), the difference between the tender and the
price (Change), and so on. Still further elaborations can separate the owner of the goods or the
owner of the money from the actual participants in the exchange arrangement.

In terms of this richly structured collection of concepts, it is possible to create contrasting

descriptions of the meanings, uses, and grammatical structuring of a very wide range of
vocabulary: buy, sell, pay, spend, cost, charge, price, change, debt, credit, owe, merchant, clerk,
broker, shop, merchandise, etc. Enriching the context by combining the commercial transaction
frame with other frames concerning the interactional settings in which participants find
themselves will allow the description of the meanings of such semantically specific words as tip,
bribe, fee, honorarium, taxes, tuition, and undoubtedly hundreds of others.

For characterizing in frame-semantic terms the class of words connected with Commercial
Transactions, we can refer in our description to Money, without feeling the need to specify
everything that can be known about the minting of coin, the social and institutional backings of a
money economy, the nature of the contract between persons in transactions involving the
exchange of money, and the like. For our purposes, we need only assume that the users of our
description already know what money is and what it is for; in other words, we can take it as a
`local primitive' - not needing explanation within the system.
The Speech Communication Frame

A speech communication frame will inherit part of its structure from more abstract frames
involving general semiotic concepts such as sender, receiver, message, medium, and the rest. All
of the verbs related to speaking will necessarily have a place for the Speaker, that is, the person
whose communicative behavior constitutes the activity we want to describe. Relevant English
verbs are say, speak, utter, whisper, talk, tell, discuss, mention, ask, promise, order, plead,
confess, warn, threaten, and scores of others.

The description of the semantic nature of these words includes a presentation of their semantic
valence properties. That is, we determine the syntactic and semantic combinatory possibilities of
these verbs by studying the structure of the phrases and sentences in which they occur, and we
ask, within such combinatorial patterns, how or whether individual frame elements get expressed.
We note whether the expression of a given frame element is obligatory or optional (or perhaps
suppressed) and what grammatical form the expression takes.

In addition to the Speaker, another necessary element in most cases is the Addressee, the
person(s) to whom speech is directed, the person(s) intended to receive and interpret what the
Speaker says. The verbs in our set must be described in different ways with respect to the
Addressee. In some cases the Addressee is obligatorily represented, e.g., when tell expresses its
message as a that-clause or as an infinitive phrase:

They told [me] that she liked Dan.

I told [him] to leave the room.

but in other cases it is optional. The syntactic realization of the Addressee role also varies. It can
be an object,

She asked [me] why the meeting had been cancelled.

the object of the preposition to,

He said it [to me] more than once.

Why don't you talk [to me]?
I've already spoken [to her] about the book.

or the object of the preposition with:

They discussed that [with me] at some length.

I've already spoken with him about the book.

In addition to the Speaker and Addressee, there is also what might be called the Topic. In some
cases the Topic can be expressed as a direct object, in other cases as the object of the preposition
about, and in some cases it cannot be expressed at all.
 We mentioned [your situation].
They discussed [your situation].
We talked [about your situation].
He said a number of things [about your situation].
We spoke [about your situation].

In addition to the Speaker, the Addressee, and the Topic, we can identify a cluster of related
frame elements associated with the Message. There is, first of all, Message-as-phonological-
form:

He said ["ouch"].

but not:
*He told me ouch.
*He uttered ouch.

Some verbs, however, can introduce the speech form if it is appositionally linked to its linguistic
characterization.

He said [the word ouch].

He uttered [the word ouch].

but not

*He told me the word ouch.

The second Message type, then, is Message-as-description, in which the realization of the
Message element is identified in grammatical or discourse-type terms.

He asked [a question].
He told [a joke/a story].
He recited [a poem].

There is also Message-as-content, in which the sentence gives an indication of the force and
content of the communication. This can be represented with that-clauses, WH-clauses, and
infinitive phrases. Notice:

They said [that you weren't ready].

They told me [that you weren't ready].
They mentioned [that you weren't ready].
They confessed [that they weren't ready].
They warned me [that they weren't ready].
But not:
*They spoke (to me) that they weren't ready.
*They talked (to me) that they weren't ready.
*They uttered that they weren't ready.
 *They discussed that they weren't ready.

Sometimes the reported message is in the form of a WH-clause but expresses a declarative rather
than an interrogative meaning:

He said [what was on his mind].

He told me [where they had hidden the gold].

A Message can also have interrogative force, expressed by a WH-cause (including one with
whether) or an IF-clause.

She asked me [where I lived].

Ask him [whether he saw the accident].
She asked [if I could leave the room].

Infinitive WH-phrases can be used to convey either declarative or interrogative messages.

He told me [what to do]. (=what I should do)

He asked me [what to do]. (=what he should do)

Plain infinitive phrases are often used for conveying commands.

I ordered them [to leave the room].

I asked them [to leave the room].
I told them [to leave the room].

But they are also used for conveying commissive speech acts.

I promised [to be home before dark].

He threatened [to leave me].

And some are used for conveying declarative propositions.

He claimed [to have witnessed the incident].

The study of verbs of speaking will identify from the corpus all of the possibilities that we find;
since the variety is so vast, this work will probably have to be supplemented by intuitive
judgments to see if the combinations that are not attested in the corpus are nevertheless permitted
in the language.
Using Frame Semantics in FrameNet

For practical reasons, frames in the FrameNet project are organized by domain, which are very general
categories of human experience and knowledge. Domains serve as useful groupings of semantic frames,
but their theoretical significance is slight and indirect. All the important information about lexical items is
captured by their associations with specific frames and by constraints on their syntactic expression of the
elements of those frames.

In the frame database, semantic generalizations across frames are captured through the abstraction of
general frames and the inheritance of these frames by more specific ones. In the resulting inheritance
lattice, it is generally true that each domain contains one general frame that captures what the more
specific frames in that domain have in common. In this respect domains do have a degree of theoretical
significance--they are broad-level generalizations over the frame network that we are constructing.

For example, in the Communication domain, all frames share the following basic structure at the
conceptual level: a Speaker communicates a Message to an Addressee in some Medium, and the Message
may be described as being about a Topic. For that reason we have defined a Basic Communication frame
consisting of these five roles: Speaker, Addressee, Message, Topic and Medium. This basic frame is
inherited by all the other frames in the Communication domain. Some of the frames that inherit the
domain, however, do not allow the overt expression of all the frame elements. For example, the words talk
and speak do not generally allow the overt expression of Message, though they both imply the existence of
a Message semantically; they both mean, very roughly, `to say something,' where something stands for a
Message. The fact that talk and speak do allow the expression of the role Topic shows that the role
Message is conceptually present, because Topic is a property of Messages.

The system of inheritance links between frames is quite complex.

Some lexical items are associated only with one frame in a single domain, so it makes sense to think of
these as belonging to a domain. Other lexical items, however, are associated with multiple frames in
different domains, as discussed below. For these items it does not make as much sense to think of them as
belonging to `a domain,' though it is often the case that one particular frame in one domain is the most
important for determining the semantic and syntactic properties of a lexical item.