Towards an Italian Legal FrameNet Exploring evidence for extending and specializing FrameNet to the legal domain

The work presented here is part of a wider on-going study aimed at investigating methodological issues and strategies towards the construction of an Italian FrameNet-like resource specialized for the legal domain, through extending and specializing the general FrameNet [1]. This study stems from the idea that FrameNet can be seen «as a backbone of several domain-specific FrameNets» [2]. To the author’s knowledge, little research has been done on the use of Fillmore’s Frame Semantics to investigate the grammatical and semantic properties of specialized languages. A noteworthy exception is [2], who successfully developed a BioFrameNet, an extension of FrameNet to the molecular biology domain. It is aimed at producing a semantically insightful analysis of this language through examining the syntactic and semantic combinatorial possibilities exhibited within a corpus of scientific writings. Interestingly, more than in the case of other domains expressed through specialized languages, the law is invariably conveyed through natural language. It is claimed that «il diritto non si serve della lingua, ma è fatto di lingua» 2 [3]. Consequently, a better understanding of legal language features results in a better understanding of law. Moreover, both linguists and legal experts state that within the legal field the domain-specific language is closely intertwined with common language. According to their studies (see among others [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]), legal language, still differing from ordinary language, is in fact not dramatically independent from every day speech; it is rather an extension of it. As reported in [4], an example of such phenomenon is the use of the bare infinitive in the pronominal form. Differently from the ordinary language usage, within the Italian legal texts it tends to occur in subordinative phrases not uniquely in conjunction with verbs of perception (such as in the following sentence: il difensore chiede applicarsi all’imputato la diminuzione della pena ‘the defense asks to apply to the defendant the reduction of the punishment’). The present study would suggest that the Fillmore’s Frame Semantics theory seems particularly appropriate to the analysis of legal language. Namely, noteworthy grammatical constructions and links with their corresponding semantic properties are pointed out thanks to the approach of frame semantics to lexical and semantic organization 3 . The value of laying out to what extent these constructions are privileged to others in law texts is made fundamental by considering that the technical language used is closely intertwined with common language. A study which documents the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities of each word in each of its senses supported by corpus evidence given by law text collections aims at being between a number of research areas. Firstly, lexicographic studies on legal terms and linguistic (grammatical) investigations on legal language are involved. Studies on legal semantics, legal theory and legal reasoning mainly carried out by scholars of jurisprudence or legal philosophers can contribute, as well. Moreover, within the Artificial Intelligence and Law community the need for automatically processing and extracting semantic information implicitly contained in law texts drew new attention to Natural Language Processing methods and techniques. The complex conceptualizations being