Frame Semantics

Frame Semantics (Fillmore (1982), Fillmore (1984), Fillmore and Atkins (1992) and so on) complements the semantic components of the Construction Grammar frame-work and emphasizes the cognitive, semantic and pragmatic aspects of language.

Frames are our structured background knowledge of experience, beliefs or practices and are presupposed for understanding the meaning of a word. As Fillmore (1982:

111) states:

By the word “frame” I have in mind any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any of them you have to understand the whole structure in which it fits; when one of the things in such a structure is introduced into a text, or into a conversation, all of the others are automati-cally made available.

The notion of frame is equivalent to an abstract domain, in the sense of Langacker (1987), or an idealized cognitive model, in the sense of Lakoff (1987). It is similar to Fillmore’s own term scene, which is used in the famous slogan “Meanings are relativized to scenes” (Fillmore (1977/2003: 209)). In this thesis, I use the termframe particularly to define verbs’ meanings. Throughout this thesis, I also use the word scene, but it is not intended to refer to Fillmore’sscene. I use it as an everyday word that means “a situation” or “an event.”

Let us see how frames work for understanding verbs’ meanings. A well-known example is the commercial transaction frame, as illustrated in Figure 12:

Figure 12: Commercial transaction frame

Fillmore (1977/2003) demonstrates how the frame is structured and in what way native speakers of English use this knowledge to describe commercial events. He deals with the nouns and verbs associated with this frame, including buy and sell.

The difference between buy and sell, for instance, lies in the perspective from which an event of transaction is described. The examples in (48) illustrate the difference:

(48) a. John bought the ball from the toy shop.

b. The toy shop sold the ball to John.

The verbbuy describes the commercial event from the BUYER’s point of view, while sell structures it from the SELLER’s point of view. Buy profiles the relation between the BUYER (=John) and the GOODS (=the ball) and chooses the BUYER as a trajector and the GOODS as a landmark. The SELLER (=the toy shop) is viewed as the source of the GOODS and thus is encoded with the source prepositionfrom. The verbsell, on the other hand, profiles the relation between the SELLER and the GOODS. For the SELLER and the GOODS, the BUYER is located at the destination of the GOODS and is encoded with the goal preposition to. These examples clarify that our mental lexicon stores the structured knowledge of lexical entries in relation to a scene composed of frame elements.

We have seen in section 2.2.3 that the lexical-semantic approach in Generative Grammar exploits only the syntactically relevant information of verb meaning to account for argument realization in syntax. This approach makes little account of the relatedness of the frame elements, including the “peripheral” elements, in a given scene. The advantage of the frame-semantic account over the lexical-semantic account is that, as the case of the commercial transaction frame suggests, our refer-ence to semantic frames enables us to grasp the systematic relationship among

semantically related verbs such asbuy,sell,chargeand costin terms of the conceptual-izer’s point of view.

Another advantage of the frame-semantic approach is that semantic frames can deal with language-specific or culture-specific information. A case in point is the Japanese commercial transaction frame. The Japanese commercial transaction frame basically has the same structure as the English one. Ueda (2009a) argues, however, that the frame includes business-practice-specific elements associated with the concept of “service” in Japanese. Service in English is defined as compensation for the money paid by the customer. While this concept has taken root in the Japanese business community, the folk concept of “service” in Japanese takes on a different characteristic. It can be observed in the use of the wordsaabisu, ‘service,’ a loanword from English. “Service” in Japanese can be characterized as being provided free of charge, in contrast to the original concept in English. It is offered for the purpose of satisfying customers. The examples in (49) reflect this characteristic:

(49) a. A shopkeeper, referring to a complimentary gift, says:

“Kore saabisu ne.”

this service is

‘This is a free gift.’

b. A customer asks for a discount:

“takai kara, sukosi saabisu site-yo.”

expensive because a.little service do

‘It’s expensive; bring the price down a little more.’

The “service” refers to a complimentary gift in (49a) and a discount in (49b). In tradi-tional Japanese business practice, shops and companies try to satisfy their customers by adding “service” to their commodities so that they seem to be worth more than the MONEY paid by their BUYERs, with the result that the SELLER can earn a good reputation. “Service” can be paraphrased as extra value added to a commodity. The scenario can be represented as the following model:

Figure 13: Japanese commercial transaction frame

There is another way of giving “service” to BUYERs. To satisfy BUYERs, SELLERs treat them politely. The conceptualizer places the BUYER at a higher status level when she or he uses honorific expressions. For example, when a store clerk makes out a receipt to a customer, she or he may write on it the nounue,‘up,’ instead of the customer’s name, to address the receipt to the customer. Another example is okaiage, which is a polite nominal expression to refer to the customer’s act of buying.

It is formed from three morphemes: the initial lettero- is the beautification prefix,kai is a nominalization of the verb kawu, ‘buy,’ and -age literally means “to raise.” The point to notice is that the third morpheme, -age, means the upward direction. This suggests that an object bought by a customer figuratively moves “up” to the customer. These two examples suggest that the BUYER is figuratively placed in a higher position, as illustrated in Figure 14, in which the placement of the BUYER is indicated by the dotted arrow:

Figure 14: The BUYER located at a higher position in the transaction frame

Our knowledge about the SELLER/BUYER relation in Japanese business practice enables us to explain why the verb kawu cannot occur in the object honorific construction, o-verb-suru, as exemplified in (50):

(50) * Boku-wa sensei-ni sinbun-o o-kai-sita

I-TOP teacher-DAT newspaper-ACC O-buy-SURU.PAST

‘I bought the teacher a newspaper.’

(key: TOP = topic case marker; DAT = dative; ACC = accusative)

The object honorific construction expresses the speaker’s politeness by downgrading the status of the referent of the Subj NP, with the result that the honored person, or the “target of honorification” in the sense of Matsumoto (1997), becomes relatively higher in status. Take (51), for example:

(51) Watasi-ga sensei-ni sono koto-o o-hanasi-sita.

I-NOM teacher-DAT that matter-ACC O-tell-SURU.PAST

‘I told the teacher that matter.’

(key: NOM = nominative)

The teacher as the target of honorification “triggers the object honorification process,” according to Shibatani (1994). Thus, the speaker, realized as the Subj NP, lowers her own status to show politeness to the teacher.

In (50), the speaker in the Subj NP is interpreted as the BUYER role in the transac-tion frame. The object honorific constructransac-tion requires the BUYER’s status to be downgraded, while the Japanese business practice elevates the BUYER’s status. This conflict leads to the ineligibility of (50).

Interestingly, we find in the novel Kesi-no naka, written by Yokomitsu Riichi, an example in which the verbkawuis used in the object honorific construction, as shown in (52), where the underline is mine:

(52) Ano ouma-wa, watasi-ga koko-no bokuzyoo-de o-kai-site sasiagemasita.

‘I bought that horse at this ranch for the Emperor of Japan.’

In this story, Johan, a Hungarian interpreter who was fluent in Japanese, conducted Kaji, a Japanese visitor, around Budapest, Hungary. He uttered the sentence in (52) when he and Kaji were talking about a horse namedSirayuki, owned by the Emperor of Japan. Since the Emperor is the head of state, everyone should be polite to him.

This factor overrides our frame-semantic knowledge of the BUYER’s status. Hence, the verb kawu is coerced into the object honorific construction. Therefore, the sentence in (52) becomes feasible.

The comparison of the commercial transaction frame between English and Japanese shows how complicated our frame-semantic knowledge is and how the knowledge is applied. For more discussion, see Ueda (2009a).

2.3.3 Goldberg’s (1995) Construction Grammar approach to argument structure