Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

120According to this view, words denote human mental images and meaning is notan inherent property of words. In fact, ―[…] to understand word meaning we must firsthave knowledge of the conceptual structures, or semantic frames, which provide thebackground and motivation for their existence in the language and their use indiscourse‖ (Fillmore et al. 2003a: 247). Thus, in Frame Semantics the backgroundknowledge relative to which a word is defined necessarily presupposes some kind ofstructured human experience because no concept is said to exist autonomously. To sumup, in Frame Semantics linguistic knowledge is not differentiated from worldknowledge.3.1.3. Frame elements and profilingAs mentioned, words are said to evoke frames. Each possible meaning that a wordevokes is said to correspond to a frame, the organisational unit in Frame Semantics.Whenever a word is linked to a specific meaning it is called a lexical unit (henceforthLU), which is in line with Cruse (1986: 80) for whom an LU is ―the union of a singlesense with a lexical form‖. In Frame Semantics, an LU is defined with respect to theframe and not necessarily relative to other words. Thus, frames organize words that areassociated by experience or by conceptual scenarios.Each frame has a given number of meaning slots or frame elements. Frameelements are regular participants or features or even attributes of the situation describedby the frame and are always attributed a semantic label. For instance, the frame that theverb to buy evokes in a sentence like Carla bought a bicycle from Pete for 50$presupposes a seller, a buyer, the goods and money. Frame elements are different fromthe case roles or semantic roles proposed in Fillmore‘s previous works (Fillmore 1968,1976). In fact, from 1977 on, Fillmore realized that the term Frame Elements is moreappropriate than the term semantic roles for several reasons.