Charles J. Fillmore

Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone

Through the detailed investigation of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of one grammatical construction, that containing the conjunction let alone, we explore the view that the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured, and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It is suggested that an explanatory model of grammar will include principles whereby a language can associate semantic and pragmatic interpretation principles with syntactic configurations larger and more complex than those definable by means of single phrase structure rules.*

Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X doing Y? construction

Our goal is to present, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, some of the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION . To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English, often known as SAI, and the highly idiomatic patterns, like kick the bucket, stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must account. An explicit grammar that covers the full range of constructions must represent all constructions, of whatever degree of generality or idiomaticity, in a common notation and must provide an explicit account of how each sentence of a language is licensed by a subset of the leaves of the inheritance hierarchy of constructions which constitutes the grammar of that language. Language-internal generalizations are captured by inheritance relations among constructions. Cross-language generalizations are captured by the architecture of the representation system and by the sharing of abstract constructions across languages. The particular grammatical phenomenon used here to introduce construction grammar (CG) is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic features of a sentence like What are they doing resuscitating constructions?

FRAME SEMANTICS AND THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE

The decision to schedule sessions on “formulating the target” for the first day of this conference, based undoubtedly on the simple wisdom that knowing what a thing is like is a prerequisite to asking how it got that way, was probably also made in the hope that the target-formulating contributions might actually lead to some sort of consensus on the nature of language. Scholars inquiring into the origin of language will surely want to agree on at least some of the details of the last scene of the evolutionary scenario they are trying to construct. Unfortunately, the problem of describing this last scene is a notoriously difficult one: making clear the true nature of language is no trivial assignment, as I think everybody here is well aware. As a contribution to a t least a part of the understanding we need, I will present for your consideration a way of talking about one aspect of the process of communicating in a human language, something I will refer to as “framing.” 1 choose this, not because I find it intrinsically more important than the formal structures of messages or meanings, or more important than the many global properties by which, from a more purely comparative perspective, human languages can be shown to differ from other communicating systems; I choose framing because 1 think it is important and because 1 suspect that it might not get mentioned, or that it might not be sufficiently highlighted, in the other papers to be read at this conference. I mean by framing the appeal, in perceiving, thinking, and communicating, to structured ways of interpreting experiences. It is an alternative to the view that concepts or categories are formed through the process of matching sets of perceptual features with, say, words. 1 plan in this paper to justify the frames notion, to give a number of examples, mostly from English, of different kinds of frame structures, to suggest informally and intuitively how the frame concept can figure in the explanation of the communication and comprehension processes, and in the end to offer some hedged speculations on how the study of frames might appear in research on evolution toward language and on the evolution of language.

Types of Lexical Information

A lexicon viewed as part of the apparatus of a generative grammar must make accessible to its users, for each lexical item, (i) the nature of the deep-structure syntactic environments into which the item may be inserted; (ii) the properties of the item to which the rules of grammar are sensitive; (iii) for an item that can be used as a ‘predicate’, the number of ‘arguments’ that it conceptually requires; (iv) the role(s) which each argument plays in the situation which the item, as predicate, can be used to indicate; (v) the presuppositions or ‘happiness conditions’ for the use of the item, the conditions which must be satisfied in order for the item to be used ‘aptly’; (vi) the nature of the conceptual or morphological relatedness of the item to other items in the lexicon; (vii) its meaning; and (viii) the phonological or orthographic shapes which the item assumes under given grammatical conditions.

Verbs of judging: An exercise in semantic description

(1969). Verbs of judging: An exercise in semantic description. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 91-117.

The Position of Embedding Transformations in a Grammar

(1963). The Position of Embedding Transformations in a Grammar. WORD: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 208-231.

The Descent of Hierarchy, and Selection in Relational Semantics

In many types of technical texts, meaning is embedded in noun compounds. A language understanding program needs to be able to interpret these in order to ascertain sentence meaning. We explore the possibility of using an existing lexical hierarchy for the purpose of placing words from a noun compound into categories, and then using this category membership to determine the relation that holds between the nouns. In this paper we present the results of an analysis of this method on two-word noun compounds from the biomedical domain, obtaining classification accuracy of approximately 90%. Since lexical hierarchies are not necessarily ideally suited for this task, we also pose the question: how far down the hierarchy must the algorithm descend before all the terms within the subhierarchy behave uniformly with respect to the semantic relation in question? We find that the topmost levels of the hierarchy yield an accurate classification, thus providing an economic way of assigning relations to noun compounds.

Subjects, Speakers, and Roles

This report is a record of issues in the semantics of natural languages that have concerned me in the past few years, some of the things I have had to say about them, and some of the things that others have had to say about them. There is nothing new in these pages, and there is much that is borrowed. I use numbered paragraphs mostly to create favorable associations — but also to make it obvious that I do not expect the reader to perceive here any structure beyond that of sheer sequence.

Grammatical Construction Theory and the Familiar Dichotomies

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichotomies. Grammatical Construction Theory differs from a number of other frameworks, first in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions, but secondly, in that it takes as a major part of its assignment the task of accounting for the workings of complex grammatical constructions as well as simple ones. The chapter only focuses on the structures that can be fully understood in terms of their constituent elements, but also in constructions that are complex to begin with. In Grammatical Construction Theory, constructions are taken as structured but not strictly decomposable, that is, they are taken as having properties in the manner of the properties of a gestalt in Gestalt Psychology. The properties of a construction may often be seen as motivated by, but they do not necessarily follow from any facts about their composition.

Framenet meets the semantic web: lexical semantics for the web

This paper describes FrameNet [9,1,3], an online lexical resource for English based on the principles of frame semantics [5,7,2]. We provide a data category specification for frame semantics and FrameNet annotations in an RDF-based language. More specifically, we provide an RDF markup for lexical units, defined as a relation between a lemma and a semantic frame, and frame-to-frame relations, namely Inheritance and Subframes. The paper includes simple examples of FrameNet annotated sentences in an XML/RDF format that references the project-specific data category specification.