Semantics

PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS II 145
appropriate argument structure, because it cannot explain lexical selection,
given that, for example, all manner verbs have the same conceptual
structure as their corresponding superordinate.
Another approach within the compositional view is offered by
Pustejovsky (1995), who presents a more conservative approach to
decomposition and where lexical templates are minimally decomposed
into structured forms or templates rather than sets of features. The result
is a generative framework for the composition of lexical meanings which
defines the well-formedness conditions for semantic expressions in a
language. Verbs are classified following Vendler’s (1967) types. Membership
in an aspectual class determines much of the semantic behaviour of the
lexical item. However, he does not develop the concept of semantic field,
strictly speaking.
Within the non-generative tradition, several proposals have emerged
in the last twenty years or so. An original contribution in linguistics is the
one proposed by Fillmore with his case grammar. The frame model
(Fillmore and Atkins’s, 1992), describes lexical meaning in terms of
structured background of experience, belief, or practices necessary for its
understanding. Words are thus not related to each other directly, but only
by virtue of their links to common background frames, which provide a
conceptual foundation for their meaning. This approach led to the
development of the Berkeley/ICSI Framenet project. It includes an inventory
of categories such as communication, cognition, emotion, space, time,
motion, body, interpersonal and institutional transaction, health, and
healthcare. The authors explain that each entry is the result of the
exploitation of corpus evidence and native speaker intuition designed to
provide a complete account of the syntactic and semantic combinatorial
properties of a lexical unit. Words are collected in semantically related sets
belonging to these domains but the authors do not explain the criteria for
domain membership or the internal organization of the domain. Part of
the description of each word is the identification of the semantic frame
underlying its analysis. Faber and Mairal (1999) suggest that the frame
model is an alternative to semantic fields and explain that they differ from
each other in that semantic fields model is a system of paradigmatic and
syntagmatic relationships connecting members of selected sets of lexical
items.
A semantic field, as understood by Lehrer and Kittay (1992), consists
of a lexical field which is applied to some content domain (a conceptual
space, an experiential domain, or a practice). Within frame semantics a
word is defined with reference to a structured background of experience,
beliefs, or practices, whereas frames are interpretative devices by which