ABSTRACT
FrameNet is a research project that seeks to instantiate the principles of Frame Semantics as proposed by Charles J. Fillmore (1977, 1985) in the analysis of the English lexicon. The main idea is that the meanings of words are best characterized in terms of experience-based schematizations of events and objects in the speaker’s world. Such schematizations relate to particular types of events and the participants and circumstances involved in them. The schematizations are referred to in Frame Semantics as “semantic frames”. Individual word senses are called “lexical units” (LUs). When a lexical unit belongs to a given frame, the LU is said to “evoke” that frame. Typically, senses of several distinct lemmas evoke a common schematization, that is, groups of word senses evoke the same frame. The roles associated with an event are referred to as “frame elements” (FEs). One and the same system of analysis applies to events, relations, states, and objects; the frame-evoking expressions may be single items or multi-word expressions, and they may belong to any syntactic category (Fillmore, Johnson and Petruck 2003).
