Charles Fillmore's theories: Case Grammar and Frame Semantics.

Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore was born on 1929. He is an American linguist and professor at the University of California. He has been a great influence in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics, and was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics. He developed the theories of Case Grammar and Frame Semantics. 

Case grammar is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence (number of subjects, objects, etc.) of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.  This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument) which are required by a specific verb. Fillmore explains that each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns. A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object.

Frame semantics is a theory that links linguistic semantics and encyclopedic knowledge. It’s a further development of case grammar. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. Another often cited example of Fillmore clearly demonstrating the above thesis is the difference in meaning between the following two sentences:

(1) I spent three hours on land this afternoon.

(2) I spent three hours on the ground this afternoon.

The background scene for the first sentence is a sea voyage while the second sentence refers to an interruption of an air travel. This leads to understand that a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept it refers to.

In Frame semantics, a semantic frame is defined as a coherent structure of concepts that are related such that without knowledge of all of them, one does not have complete knowledge of one of the either. Frames are evoked, among other things, by words as the semantic conceptual content of the word activates the frame of encyclopedic meaning that is needed for the understanding of that word.

While originally only being applied to lexemes, frame semantics has now been expanded to grammatical constructions and other larger and more complex linguistic units and has more or less been integrated into construction grammar as the main semantic principle.

Fillmore is currently working on FrameNet. FrameNet is a project housed at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California which produces an electronic resource based on a theory of meaning called frame semantics. FrameNet reveals for example that the sentence "John sold a car to Mary" essentially describes the same basic situation (semantic frame) as "Mary bought a car from John", just from a different perspective. A semantic frame can be thought of as a conceptual structure describing an event, relation, or object and the participants in it. The FrameNet lexical database contains around 1,200 semantic frames, 13,000 lexical units (a pairing of a word with a meaning; polysemous words are represented by several lexical units) and over 190,000 example sentences.

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