Frame construction

Because of constraints on my time imposed by the Faculty (participation in a hiring committee for a new professor) I have had to modify the original plan for this lesson.

This section is now concerned with revision of the previous units on Nouns, Verbs, construction of different kinds of information sets for these items (informal meaning profiles, distributional word sketches, and frame construction) and with initial preparations for the end-of-term project.

Tasks:

1. Find examples of verbs which have different frames (e.g. intransitive, trasitive, prepositional, sentence-complement, ...)
2. Formulate (informal) meaning profiles for these verbs.
3. Formulate (distributional) word sketches for these verbs.
4. Formulate details of the frames in which these verbs occur.
5. Specific case: the same frame can be formulated for all the following examples:
   1. John opened the door.
   2. This key opened the door.
   3. John opened the door with this key.
   4. The door opened.
   5. The door opened with this key.
   6. The door was opened with this key.
   7. The door was opened by John.
   8. The door was opened by John with this key.
   Formulate this frame, and explain where the differences come from. (Hint: look for information about an old and very famous paper by Charles Fillmore called "The Case for Case" (1968).
6. Formulate dictionary entries for these verbs.
7. Derive nouns from these verbs by means of suffixes (perhaps also prefixes).
8. Formulate noun phrases for these deverbal nouns in which the structure of the verbal frame is reflected.

Hint:

Revise the previous section on verbs.

A straightforward example:

Verb: paint, transitive.

MP: To cover a surface with a solution or suspension of coloured pigment.

WS: (Revise the Kilgarriff method.)

Frame: [AGENT:[+human]     OBJECT:[+concrete],INSTRUMENT:[+liquid]]

Dictionary entry: (Include POS, frame and definition by nearest kind and specific differences in the entry.)

Derived nouns: painting, painter NPs:

Project preparation

Pick an English text on a topic which appeals to you, and try applying the methods you have learned so far in this class to selected words in the text. This will include building up a word field on the topic (perhaps using additional corpus material) and using techniques such as informal meaning sketches, concordancing, distributional word sketches, frame construction.