From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat 22 Feb 2003 - 16:33:30 GMT
>> The cognitive linguists (Turner, Fauconnier, Lakoff, etc.) seem to be
referring to the frame concept of Charles J. Fillmore; cf. his widely cited
article “Frame Semantics” (The Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.) 1982:
Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshon Publishing Co.). As far as
I can discern, Fillmore’s frames are more or less the same as Fauconnier’s
mental spaces (1994: Mental Spaces. Cambridge UP; 1997: Mappings in Thought
and Language. Cambridge! UP).
>About the computer-mind metaphor that is entirely unacceptable to those
>people, as anyone can see from scanning Lakoff and Johnson. In a sense,
>their aversion to MIT/Chomskyan linguistics defines the identity of
>cognitive linguistics.
Differences between the UCSD and MIT approaches to frames:
Frame Semantics
Fillmore (1982) suggests that there exist many, many words which rely for
their understanding on speakers' experience with the scenarios and social
institutions they presuppose. For example, words such as ``Tuesday'' cannot
even be defined without providing a certain amount of background information
about the more general concept of the organization of the week. Similarly
the significance of the distinction between ``week'' and ``weekend'' arises
because its meaning is motivated by the practice of the 5-day work week.
Thus Fillmore defines a frame as a system of categories whose structure is
rooted in some motivating context. Words are defined with respect to a frame
and perform a categorization that takes the frame for granted.
Fillmore (1982) emphasizes how meanings grow out of these motivating
experiences and thus lexical semantics requires an account of how and why
people use words, as well as a characterization of the scenarios they
presuppose. Fillmore construes frame semantics as a far-reaching research
program with implications for lexical semantics, meaning change, the
creation of novel words, and even the assembly of the overall meaning of a
text. In lexical semantics, for example, the aim is to characterize the
motivating context for a particular word and explain how the word's meaning
relates to that context. Thus words are defined with respect to frames, and
are used to evoke them.
Fillmore (1977) shows how a number of verbs, including ``buy,'' ``sell,''
and ``pay,'' are related to one another in virtue of how they highlight
certain aspects of the same Commercial Event frame. Indeed a number of verbs
can be understood as evoking the same frame, but accentuating (or profiling)
the perspective, motives, or intentions of particular participants. Examples
include ``buy'' versus ``sell'' (Fillmore, 1977), ``give'' versus ``take''
(Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, & Gleitman, 1991), and ``substitute'' versus
``replace'' (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). Examples such as this accentuate how
meaning cues the particular construal of events rather than merely providing
speakers with an objective characterization. Moreover, they demonstrate how
frames are motivated by human experiences, social institutions, and cultural
practices.
Similarly, the meaning of ``bachelor,'' classically defined as an unmarried
man, can be shown to depend on the existence of background information
grounded in social practice. Questioning whether, say, the pope, tarzan, or
a gay man in a long-term relationship count as bachelors, Fillmore argues
that the definition of ``bachelor'' as an unmarried man relies on the
existence of a frame, or set of propositions which represent common
assumptions about the normal course of a man's life in western society. Much
as our understanding of ``on'' in (6) and (7) involves a tacit assumption of
a gravitational field, talk about bachelors involves implicit acceptance of
its background assumptions. When these assumptions do not obtain for a
particular man, say Pope John Paul II, we are hesitant to apply the term
``bachelor.''
Lakoff (1987) emphasizes the idealized character of the background
assumptions represented in frames. Because these assumptions involve a large
degree of oversimplification, they apply more easily to certain segments of
society than others. Thus grounding lexical semantics in these idealized
cognitive models has the virtue of providing an account of prototype effects
in categorization. The frames invoked by linguists to understand lexical
semantics can also be used to explain other cognitive tasks, including
reasoning, problem solving, and making judgments about the behavior of
others.
Frames as data structures.
Fillmore's linguistically motivated account of a frame is paralleled by
similar suggestions from researchers in other branches of cognitive science.
In the field of artificial intelligence, Minsky (1975) proposed the term
frame for a data structure used to represent commonly encountered,
stereotyped situations. Minsky offered a child's birthday party as an
example of the sort of thing a frame might be used to represent. A birthday
party frame includes slots, such as food, games, and presents, which specify
general features of the event. Slots are bound to fillers, or
representations of the particulars of a situation. In a process called
slot-filling, slots such as food are bound to fillers such as cake and
ice-cream.
The efficiency of frames as data structures derives from the organization of
general slots which can be bound to particular fillers. This provides a
means of organizing the similarities as well as the differences which exist
between our various experiences of children's birthday parties. Activating a
frame creates expectations about important aspects of the context by
directing the agent to fill the slots with available information. Moreover,
the real power of frames derives from the use of default values which
consist of the most typical and/or frequent filler for each slot. If
information about the actual slot-filler is unavailable, a slot is assumed
to be filled by the default.
The beauty of Minsky's suggestion was the notion that frames contain the
sorts of information needed to understand a particular sort of event or
scenario, as well as default information about the most probable fillers for
any given slot. Moreover, the representational structure in frames proved to
be valuable in building computer systems to understand natural language. In
the course of developing a system that could understand simple stories,
Schank & Abelson (1977) postulated scripts as analogous to Minsky's frames.
Scripts represent stereotyped sequences of events such as going to a
restaurant, and contain slots which are either filled by binding the
particular fillers manifest in the situation at hand, or by instantiating
the default value for any particular slot.
While the frame type data structure was largely motivated by considerations
of representational utility, cognitive psychologists have found considerable
evidence that people utilize frames, or schemata (schemas) as they are
called in the psychological literature, in a variety of cognitive tasks.
People use frames in perception, planning, and memory for events (Barsalou,
1992). Moreover, frames have been used to explain human ability to make
inferences in complex situations, to make default assumptions about
unmentioned aspects of situations, and to make predictions about the
consequences of actions. <footnode.html> <footnode.html>
In cognitive semantics, meaning does not involve mapping from terms to
objects, actions, and events in the world. Rather, words designate elements
and relations in frames which may represent objective aspects of reality,
but need not (Fauconnier, 1997). So, instead of positing one set of
processes to track correspondences between terms and objects, and another
for terms and various abstract, relational properties, we can see the former
as following trivially from the latter. That is, words are always understood
as setting up frames, regardless of whether those frames apply to actual,
representational, or hypothetical referents. Apparent core cases - where
frames apply directly to real-world referents - are merely a subset of a
more inclusive phenomenon.
Consequently, there is nothing to be gained from treating these so-called
core meanings as more fundamental than more exotic looking utterance
meanings. For one thing, doing away with the notion of core meanings
dissolves the problem of how to circumscribe the core and parameterize its
extensions. Moreover, addressing more exotic cases of meaning construction
has led to an important locus of generativity in language production, namely
the human capacity to map within and between frames and scenarios.
Grant
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