Orð og tunga - 01.06.2006, Page 57

Matthew Whelpton: Argument Structure
55
The parent frame of Cause_harm is thus the frame Intentionally_affect
and inherits from it a particular set of conceptual properties. This
frame can also bear other relations than inclusion/inheritance. For in-
stance, it will be linked to particular structured frames which describe
possible Causes or Agents of the harm - in Figure 10 for instance we
see the frame Toxic_substance listed. In this way, the representation at-
tempts to address the problem faced by all who study lexical meaning
that the sense of particular words in context seems ultimately to pull
in or play on our total knowledge of how the world (and our culture)
works.
The FrameNet project thus aims at the ultimate ambition of pro-
viding a computer-tractible model of human conceptual structure,
within which language is embedded. I said earlier that traditional
dictionaries are essentially encyclopedias of words - the FrameNet
project effectively claims that an encyclopedia of words, properly pur-
sued as a part of cognitive science, will be nothing less than an ency-
clopedia of the mind...
3 Conclusion
So where does that leave us? The approaches of Levin, the Word-
Net project and Fillmore's FrameNet project show a range of possi-
ble ways that theoretical linguists and dictionary makers can inter-
act. Certainly, linguists may still pursue explicit models of syntactic
organisation and lexicographers may still pursue an encyclopaedic
listing of the diverse properties of words. But linguists can pursue
their work more effectively with the resources that a corpora-driven
grammatically-sensitive dictionary can now offer. And lexicographers
can expand and enrich the sophistication of the information they pro-
vide concerning a word's syntactic behaviour through the research ef-
forts of linguists.
What kinds of information might a linguist find useful? A list of
the different phrases that form a word's complementation; a list of the
case assignments associated with these complementation pattems; a
classification of verbs in terms of "conceptual components" or "sense
type", e.g. Transfer, psychological experience, intemal change of state,
external change of state etc. A linguist can more easily investigate
theoretical questions using data organised in this way - and I would