Framenet and its Limitations. The Case of Entity-Specific Change-of-State Verbs

Abstract

This article examines the proposals made by the FrameNet project (Atkins, Fillmore and Johnson 2003; Fillmore, Johnson and Petruck 2003) with regard to Levin’s (1993) entity-specific change-of-state verbs. We have identified several limitations in this database: (i) only a small number of entity-specific change-of¬state verbs were listed in FrameNet (eight out of twenty-one verbs); (ii) there is a separation of the causative and inchoative uses of a verb into two different frames; (iii) in some cases no examples are provided for the Frame Elements of a particular verb (e.g. there are no examples for the verb swell in the ‘expansion’ and ‘change of position on a scale’ frames); (iv) usually FrameNet includes literal instantiations of the predicates under consideration and when figurative uses are listed no cognitive motivation is given for these metaphorical expressions; (v) often frames are incomplete owing to the use of a small size corpus (i.e. the British National Corpus), which offers a limited number of examples for a given verb. It will also be shown that metaphor and metonymy play a crucial role in regulating the subsumption processes between predicates and constructions.