XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

This work is dedicated to such an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics as Charles J. Fillmore. He worked as a professor for ten years at The Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of Syntax and Lexical Semantics.

By 1965, Fillmore had come to acknowledge that semantics plays a crucial role in grammar.

The Case for Case Fillmore (1968) proposed a limited set of semantic roles (also known as deep cases) such as Agentive, Instrumental, Dative, Locative, and Objective that are organized in a specific hierarchy for realizing grammatical functions. For example, Agentive was at the top of the hierarchy, followed by Instrumental, Objective, and others. This hierarchy was used to ensure proper linking of a particular semantic role to syntax depending on the total number of roles present. For example, in sentences such as Kim opened the door, the Agentive would be realized in subject position because the Agentive role is the highest in the hierarchy. In contrast, in sentences such as The key opened the door, the Instrumental would be realized in subject position because there was no Agentive to link to subject position and the Instrumental was the next role down in the hierarchy.

Following his move to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, this theory eventually evolved into a broader cognitive linguistic theory called Frame Semantics (1976). A commercial event, for instance, crucially involved elements such as a seller, a buyer, some good, and some money. In language, such an event can be expressed in a variety of different ways, e.g. using the verb 'to sell' or the verb 'to buy'. According to frame semantics, meaning is best studied in terms of the mental concepts and participants in the minds of the speaker and addressee.

Around the same time, Fillmore's Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, delivered in 1971 and published in 1975, contributed to establishing the field of linguistic pragmatics, which studies the relationship between linguistic form and the context of utterance.

In all of this research, he illuminated the fundamental importance of semantics, and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena. His collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff was generalized into the theory of Construction Grammar. This work aimed at developing a complete theory of grammar that would fully acknowledge the role of semantics right from the start, while simultaneously adopting constraint-based formalisms as popular in computer science and natural language processing. This theory built on the notion of construction from traditional and pedagogical grammars rather than the rule-based formalisms that dominate most of generative grammar. One of Fillmore's most widely noticed works of the time (with Paul Kay and Cathy O'Connor) appeared in 'Language' in 1988 as "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone". Their paper highlighted the merits of such a theory of by focusing on the 'let alone' construction. Over time, construction grammar developed into a research area of its own, and a number of variants have been proposed over the years by different researchers.

In the 1990s, Fillmore taught classes in computational lexicography at the University of Pisa, where he met Sue Atkins, who was conducting frame-semantic analyses from a lexicographic perspective. In their subsequent discussions and collaborations, Fillmore came to acknowledge the importance of considering corpus data. They discussed the "dictionary of the future", in which every word would be linked to example sentences from corpora.

After 23 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Fillmore retired in 1994 and joined Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.There, he started a project called FrameNet, an on-line structured description of the English lexicon implementing much of what he had earlier proposed more theoretically in his theory of Frame semantics, while implementing the idea of emphasizing example sentences from corpora. In FrameNet, words are described in terms of the frames they evoke. Data is gathered from the British National Corpus, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by both lexical items and Frames.

FrameNet has inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Due to the project's influence, issue 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to FrameNet. The project has been highly influential in computational linguistics and natural language processing as well. FrameNet led to the establishment of the task of shallow semantic parsing or automatic semantic role labelling (SRL). The first automatic SRL system was developed by Berkeley graduate student Daniel Gildea. Semantic Role Labelling has since become one of the standard NLP tasks. In recognition of his contributions to computational linguistics, Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Together with Collin F. Baker, he also received the 2012 Antonio Zampolli Prize, awarded by the European Language Resources Association.

In this work, we studied the biography of Fillmore, noted the main significant events in his life, studied his contribution to linguistics and examined in detail the main ideas that he put forward.

This work was interesting since I learned many new concepts in cognitive linguistics, got a general idea of Fillmore's contribution to this science. I believe that his contribution was significant, since other linguists began to use the ideas he proposed and applied them to languages other than English.

References

Bergen, Benjamin K., and Nancy Chang. 2005. Embodied construction grammar in simulation-based language understanding. Construction grammars: Cognitive grounding and theoretical extensions, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Mirjam Fried, 147–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fillmore, Charles j.; Baker Collin.A frames approach to semantic analysis.

Fillmore, Charles j.; Paul Kay; and Mary Catherine O’Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language 64.401–538.

Hans C. Boas and Ryan Dux From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames.