- •8.1. Regularity and variation in language
- •8.2. Two views of context
- •8.2.1. The externalist perspective: Property selection and radical pragmatics
- •8.3. The schematic nature of meaning
- •8.}.I. The positive component: Scenes and prototypes
- •8.3.2. The contrastive component: Frames and semantic fields
- •8.}.}. The narrative component of lexical meaning
- •8.4. Conclusions and unresolved questions
- •9.1. Semantically restricted inferences and non-restricted inferences
- •9.2. Frames and schematic activation
- •9.2.1. Default values and typicality
- •9.3. Background and foreground: The structure of essential properties
- •10.2. Forms of experience and the role of perception
- •10.3. The nature of semantic properties
- •10.4. Perceptual properties and functional properties: Experimental and neurolinguistic data
- •10.5. The axiological dimension of lexical meaning
- •10.5.4. Pathemic semes
- •1. Three Approaches to Meaning
- •2. Componential Analysis and Feature Semantics
- •3. A Synthesis and Some Problems
- •4. The Alternative to the Classical Model
- •9. Lexical Semantics and Textual Interpretation
8.4. Conclusions and unresolved questions
To conclude, we have seen how the concepts of frame, scene, schema, and such like make possible a semantic representation that is capable of:
1. Grasping the dynamic and intrinsically narrative natute of many lexical units. Not only predicates, in which the nattative aspect is implicit in theit valency, but also a great many nouns, when projected onto underlying schemata, are surface condensations of narrative conceptual struct tires.
2. (living .111 account o/ inttalinguistic semantic tela lions, of the positional
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values of the individual terms that are set up within semantic microuni-verses. In this way, the fundamental insight about lexical structure which was at the heart of the theory of semantic fields is maintained, overcoming, however, its purely lexicalist perspective. 3. Representing the schematic nature of meaning, by connecting the surface lexical manifestations to underlying conceptual configurations. The regularity of the lexicon is thus explained in terms of a regularity of scenes, to use Fillmore's terminology, or, as I have suggested, of a regularity of the contexts of reference.
There are, however, a number of unresolved problems with a schematically based semantics that relies on the notion of frames (or similar concepts). The most important one seems to me to be the extension and the number of frames themselves. How many frames should there be? What "size" should they have? How do we specify their format? These problems are clearly connected, because the number of frames depends on their extension. Although this problem is well known in the field of artificial intelligence, it has been discussed much less in the field of linguistics, and there is not much clarity on this point. The "dimensions" of the proposed frames are often very different and in some cases appear to be determined ad hoc according to the specific analysis being conducted. Within Fillmore's frame semantics, fot example, very general frames and scenes, such as the commercial event that covers a lexical domain comprising many terms, co-exist with highly specific scenes, like the one relating to the meaning of risk, which is valid only for that particular term.
The problem is complicated further by the fact that the schemata are hierarchically embedded and the same sequence of actions or events may be described at different levels of abstraction.22 Consequently, a commercial transaction can be traced back to the scene of the commercial event, but also to a more general scene of exchange, which in turn is inserted in an even more abstract schema of "contract." This means that many analyses could be reformulated using different underlying schemata because once the format is no longer the lexical unit the extension of the descriptive schema may be subject to different criteria that do not yet appear to have been unified.
But one might also ask whether such unification is desirable, let alone possible. Why, in fact, should frames and scenes be uniform in terms of their extension and encyclopedic complexity? In the lexicon, within nominal semantics alone, there are words that contain a complex passionate and narrative world, such as anger and ransom, and other words like triangle that relate to a simple and delimited schema. It is likely that a unitary treatment of all lexical classes is impossible and that the heterogeneity in content organization necessarily requires schemata of different-sized grains.
Ar any rate, besides this problem, which I will return to in chapter 10, the most interesting thing about the use ol frames in lexical semantics may be that it manages to give .1 sysieinaiit account ol' the mechanisms of regularity and pre
Regularity and Context
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dictability of interpretative processes. Interpretative activity, in fact, unfolds from the prototypical scenes, or standard contexts of reference, with which the lexical meanings are associated. Thus, unless there are explicitly contradictory textual markers, the semantic properties of the typical scene are implicitly activated each time a given term is uttered. They operate as values by default: in the absence of signs to the contrary, they are automatically considered valid. With the mechanism of activation by default, lexical semantics becomes an integral part of a theory of textual interpretation.
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LEXICAL SEMANTICS AND TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION