Border Conflicts: FrameNet Meets Construction Grammar

1. The Problem I count myself among the linguists who believe in a continuity between grammar and lexicon (Fillmore et al. 1988, Joshi 1985), and I entertain the common image that each lexical item carries with it instructions on how it fits into a larger semantic-syntactic structure, or, alternatively, on how semantic-syntactic structures are to be built around it. My remarks here specifically concern an ongoing effort to describe and to annotate instances of, non-core syntactic structures, and to see how the products of this work can be integrated with the existing lexical resource, called FrameNet (FN), which is a set of procedures, and a growing database for recording the meanings and the semantic and syntactic combinatorial properties of lexical units. The FrameNet project, which I have directed since 1997, has recently begun exploring ways of creating a constructicon, a record of English grammatical constructions, annotating sentences by noting which parts of them are licensed by which specific constructions. The grammatical constructions that belong in the larger constructicon that is, in a construction-based grammar include those that cover the basic and familiar patterns of predication, modification, complementation, and determination, but the new project is concentrating on constructions that ordinary parsers are not likely to notice, or that grammar checkers are likely to question. Some of them involve purely grammatical patterns with no reference to any lexical items that participate in them, some involve descriptions of enhanced demands that certain lexical units make on their surroundings, and some are mixtures of the two.