Introduction to the concept of frame

In this chapter, we present our results regarding the syntactic description of the subcategorisation of verbs. We note, however, that our results could easily be extended to the syntactic description of other parts of speech. It has to be emphasised that the purpose of our work in dealing with standardisation is the following:

Identify a core of linguistic substance;
Propose a (very small) set of primitives;
Propose a neutral descriptive formalism based on this small set;
Make it easy in this formalism to encode the basic notions (mandatory);
Give the possibility in this formalism to coherently encode more refined information.

The different approaches to subcategorisation that have been examined exhibit many common notions, linked together in different combinations but reflecting a common core. The main points where divergences occur concern:

The definition of the boundary between what has to be described in the syntactic part of the lexicon and what in the semantic part;
Whether some semantic information has to be part of the description of the syntactic properties of the lexical entries; and, as a consequence,
Whether the interface between syntax and semantics is partly included in the syntactic description of the lexicon.

In order to avoid committing ourselves to a specific approach, we opted for a representation model where no particular criteria are adopted to fix the boundaries and the interface between syntax and semantics. The main descriptive core is purely syntactic, but the possibility of encoding semantic information which has a direct bearing on syntactic behaviour is also given. Coherence with existing standardisation work for other aspects of lexical description has been insured by taking into account the results of the EAGLES morphosyntactic group.