Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

125As mentioned in the previous section, the idea of Frame Semantics is that wordmeanings must be described in relation to semantic frames. FrameNet lexicography usesthe British National Corpus (BNC) to understand how frames underlie the meanings ofa large number of English verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions as well asto identify their valence patterns (the ways in which the semantic properties are givenlinguistic form). Thus, FrameNet lexicography can be divided into two main activities.The first one consists in identifying the frames evokes by the LUs and in defining theframes. The second activity consists in annotating the sentences so as to show how theFEs fit syntactically around the LU that evokes the frame.3.2.1.1. Frame developmentThe FrameNet methodology follows a top-down approach that consists in identifying aframe, describing it and developing a list of frame-evoking words. After choosing aframe, FrameNet lexicographers start working on the frame by giving an informaldescription of the type of situation that the frame represents. By way of an example,consider a situation in which someone is not in agreement with someone else aboutsomething. FrameNetters then prepare a list of words that may evoke this frame or thatcan be explained with reference to the frame. They explain that this stage is ―the‗armchair linguistics‘ part of [their] work: [they] appeal to the native speaker intuition;[they] consult paper and electronic dictionaries and thesauri; and occasionally [they]make forays into the lexical semantics literature‖ (Fillmore et al. 2003b: 299).For instance, a word that may evoke a situation in which someone is not inagreement with someone else about something is the verb to argue. FrameNetters thenquery a corpus and examine the KWIC lines of the lemma argue (Figure 17).