Semantic Framing for Specialized Knowledge Modelling

Abstract

The chapter is devoted to the updated method of Ch. Fillmore’s semantic framing applied to specialized texts. First, we define roles as the qualifiers of arguments in a discourse event. They comprise both the semantics and syntactic positions of arguments supplementing a verb in a simple sentence or a clause, referring to an act of an event. In a sentence or a clause, an act is expressed by a verb characterized by specific valent properties and arguments, which comply with the verb. Altogether, they make the frame of the act.

The study shows that the semantic role is primarily determined by the syntactic role of the term in a sentence. The chapter attempts to provide a new logic to the system of roles or deep cases, divided into five major semantic groups: Actor, Object, Locative, Temporal, and Qualitative modifiers. One can find correlations with certain syntactic parts of a sentence. For example, the Actor group usually refers to the subject of the sentence, the Object, to the object, the Locative modifier, to the adverbial modifier of place, the Temporal modifier to the adverbial modifier of time and the Qualitative modifier, to the attribute.

Further, we describe these semantic groups which contain specific semantic roles. In our classification, the Actor semantic group includes the roles of the Agent, the Protoagent, and the Experiencer. It is shown that the subject or the actor of the clause is the Agent or the Experiencer of the semantic frame. In passive constructions, the initiator of the action is introduced with the preposition by and is assigned the Protoagent role.

The Object semantic group is widely represented in a specialized discourse. It includes the semantic roles of the Counteragent, the Comitative, the Patient, the Benefactive, the Addressee, the Cause, the Perceptive, the Objective, the Instrument, and the Result.

We separately examine the semantic groups of the Locative, the Temporal, and the Qualitative Modifiers. The Locative group contains the roles of the Place, the Source, the Target, and the Trajectory. The Temporal modifier specifies the time of the action, and the Qualitative modifier provides the particularizing and descriptive information in the form of the Specifier and the Feature roles.

The system helps establish syntactic-semantic relations between arguments in a specialized discourse event, highlighting the synergy between language, grammar, thought, and communication.