External syntagmatic classification of verbs

External syntagmatic properties are often defined in terms of frames, and various kinds of frame will be found in the linguistic literature: subcategorisation frames, selectional frames, case frames, role frames, ...

A frame is essentially a template or pattern which is filled in by specific characteristics of the word concerned; the different kinds of frame relate to different kinds of specific characteristics of the word, especially syntactic and semantic properties. There are two ways of expressing frame information: structural and functional.

The main kinds of structural frame are, in order of decreasing generality:

Subcategorisation frame:

The syntactic part of speech (POS) configuration of the phrase in which a verb occurs. For example:

• All English verbs require a subject, and in simple sentences with no special word order conditions the frame would specify [ NP     ], where the     specifies the position of the verb, so that the whole structure would be [ NP    V ].
• However, this only specifies intransitive verbs, i.e. verbs with no object. The specification of a transitive verb is [ NP     NP ].

Selectional frame:

There are semantic restrictions (which may not be as apparent in joking or metaphorical contexts) between verbs and the nouns with which they typically occur. For example:

• Some verbs, like `eat', typically occur with `animate subjects'. This verb also typically occurs with `organic objects'. One traditional way (though not uncontroversial) was of expressing the selectional frame for `eat' is [ +animate     +organic ].

Collocational frame:

Sometimes the semantic restrictions are much stricter, requiring a specific word or a small set of words in the frame. An example of a collocational frame for `moo' would include `cow' as the typical subject, e.g. [ [ NP cow ]     ... ].

Idiom frame:

Even more strict are idiom frames, in which several words figure in the frame. For example: [ [(NP    ) can't make head or tail of (NP    ) ] ].

Logically, verbs are generally treated as predicates which take a certain number of arguments. We will return to this topic in a later session.

The main traditional kinds of functional frame, which will not be commented on further here, come from different theoretical directions:

• Argument structure,
• S V O (etc.),
• case frame,
• theta role frame.

Although the concept of frame is usually applied to verbs, it can - perhaps surprisingly - be applied to all other parts of speech, too.

Tasks:

Search for definitions and examples of the following concepts on the web, including their origin in the history of linguistics:

1. subcategorisation (frame),
2. case (frame),
3. role frame,
4. Construction Grammar,
5. Frame Grammar,
6. transformations,
7. lexical rules (which, like transformations, relate frames which have different structures).

Note that Kilgarriff's Word Sketches are essentially statements of the frames in which words occur, especially of the syntactic structural frame involving parts of speech.