Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

123exchanging the goods for money (the SELLER), the goods which the Buyer did or couldacquire (the GOODS), and the money acquired (or sought) by the seller (the MONEY)‖(Fillmore 1982: 116).Table 8. Elements of the frame evoked by sellSentence SELLER SELL GOODS BUYER MONEY[1] Pete sold the bicycle to Carla for 50$[2] Pete sold the bicycle to Carla –[3] Pete sold the bicycle – for 50$[4] Pete sold the bicycle – –As a result, buy and sell contain the same meaning slots (i.e. Buyer, Seller,Goods and Money), even if these are in a syntactically different order (compare Table 7with Table 8). The verb buy focuses on the actions of the BUYER with respect to theGOODS, backgrounding the SELLER and the MONEY, whereas the verb sell focuses onthe actions of the SELLER with respect to the GOODS, backgrounding the BUYER and theMONEY. This means that the verb buy requires (syntactically) obligatorily a BUYER andGOODS, and optionally a SELLER and MONEY. Similarly, the verb sell requiresobligatorily a SELLER and GOODS, and optionally a BUYER and MONEY. Contexts [5-7]from Group A and from Group B are ungrammatical because the frame element GOODSwhich is obligatory in both buy and sell is omitted.This way, these verbs are said to evoke or connect to the [Commerce] frame butthey do it in a different way in that they present two different perspectives of the samesituation: in the case of buy the Buyer is viewed as agent and in the case of sell theSeller is. Thus, although the LUs sell and buy share the same base (the frame[Commerce]), they are two different profiles of it ([Commerce_sell] and