Fundamental
Studies
in Computer Science
Llngulstlc
Structures
Processing
Advisoty Roard:
edited by
J. F€ldman, R Karp, L. Nolin, M.o. Rabin, J.c. Shepher&on,
A. vsn
d€r sluis
aIId
P. wesner
ANTONIO
ZAMPOLLI
Dircctor of Lingußtics Diyisiott,
CNUCE - Institute of ltalian Natienat Research
Councit rcNR)
VOLUME 5
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1977NORTH.HOLLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY NORTH.HOLLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY
Scenes-and-frames
semantics
Charles
J. Fillmore
University of Berkeley, Califumia
0.
I think that everyone. in linguistics and language research sees a need for an integrated vipw oflanguage structure, language behavior, language" comprehensfun, language change, and language acq-uisition. I suspect that what strikes me as the current Zeitgeist in language research offers material to meet this need, though some of it is still somewhat hidden; and I keep getting the feeling that sooner or later it is going to be possible for workers in linguistic semantics, anthropotogical semantics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence - and may be even language philosphy - to talk to each other using more or less the same language, and thinking about more or less the same problems.
l .
One of the live issues making up part of this Zeitgeist is the question of whether the description of meaning strould be formulated as a checklist -that is, as a list of conditions-that must be satisfied in order for a given tinguistic expression to be appropriately and/or truthfully used - or whether the analysis of meaning requires, at least in some cases, an appeal to a prototype - the prototype being possibly something which is innately available to the human mind, possibly something which instead öf being analyzed, needs to be presented or demonstrated or manipulated.
The color term studies of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1) suggest a
prototype semantics, especially with the supporting evidence that there are physlologically built-in predispositions in human beings for perceiving or recognizing or categorizing certain hues. That is to say, in the prototype color semantics, to know red isto know something more or less directly, but to know pink is to know red and to know that pink differs from red
U
along a certain dimension and to a certain degree.
Much of the work on the part of the psychologist Eleanor Rosch on natural categories (2) suggests a prototype semantics. For the point I am making, the'naturalness'of the categories is not so much the issue;but that helps. The prototype semantic notion I have in mind is this: I can know a sqwre more or less directly; a trapezoid I know, however, in the first instance anyway, as a square that got distorted in a particular way.
Related to these questions is what some researchers see as the problem of determining linguistic category boundaries. This work is exemplified in some recent studies of William Labov's (3). Knowing the category anp (as opposed to glass or bowl) is recognizing such properties as the ratio between the circumference of the opening and the height of the container, having one handle, being made of opaque vitreous material, being used for consumption of liquid food, being accompanied with a saucer, tapering, and being circular in cross-section. The conditions for proper cuphood, one could conclude from this literature, requires an object's falling within an acceptable range on each ofthese several dimensions, or departing from the expected range within one dimension only if the departure is
compensated for by meeting certain other conditions in the other dimensions.
One way of looking at some of this category-boundary research is to say that it provides us with the fairly complicated function that specifies the boundary conditions for a category. Another way of looking at it is some-thing like this. People know from their kitchens and their dining rooms and from their experiences in restaurants such things as what a typical cup looks like, what kinds of settings it is usually found in, and what it is used for. From these experiences people have lots of examples of clear cases of cups. They have, morecver, the same sort of knowledge about glasses and bowls and dishes and trays and saucers. When'confronted with monster cups ofthe kind Labov and his collaborators presented or depicted in the experimental setting, they have had to draw from a repertory of categories that does not cover this new case, but within which there rnight be one category which fits this new case better than any of the others. They have either had to decide on one category from this repertory which fits this new experience in some sufficiently satisfying way - there being nothing better - or thev have refused to decide.
Perhaps it could be argued that we have here two ways of saying the same thing; that may be so, but I think there is a difference. The difference that I see is in the kinds of research questions that can be naturally formulated within the two views. Asking for the boundary conditions for a particular
category is asking a very special kind of question; asking about the strategies used by people in projecting from a repertory ofprototypes onto novel situations is asking a very general kind ofquestion. Ifthere are systematic differences between individuals or between communities in the management of these strategies, or if it turns out that these strategies also figure in the description of historical changes in the meanings of words, then 1 think the prototype view is the more helpful one to take.
(In general, the prototype theory offers an alternative to a popular but decreasingly satisfying view, the view that people's judgments on how to talk in experimentally presented bizarre contexts offer subtle kinds of evidence for the existence of dialect differences that would otherwise have gone undiscovered. Prototype semantics can be thought of as a '
generahzation ofthe view that a theory oflanguage needs to distinguish between having a rule and using a rule. It may turn out to be much more useful to speak of the 'internalized' linguistic rules as being simple rules which cover prototypic cases, and thgn to speak of much of the so-called 'dialect' differences that generative grammarians are fond of positing as involving, not differences in the character of the internalized rules, but differences in people's strategies for using these rules).
Another side of the question we are examining has to do with what I have learned from Wallace Chafe to refer to as the distinction between formal knowledge and experiential knowledge. Formal knowledge is the kind of knowledge that can be formulated propositionally ; experiential knowledge is the kind of knowledge that efi$ts as memories of experiences - the really clear cases of the latter being such things as knowing what somebody's face looks like.
This distinction is relevant to the prototype theory of meaning, because one conceivable and not unreasonable version of such a theory might be that the prototypes are essentially experiential. On this view, the process of using a word in a novel situation involves comparing current experiences with past experiences and judging whether they are similar enough to ball for the same linguistic encoding.
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Something like the prototype idea can be found in the open texture concept of the philosopher Waismann (4), in the enactive and iconic memory representations of Bruner (5), in Lindsay's discussion of the need for something akin to mental pictures in the design of language translation and problem solving systems within artificial intelligence (6), in
wittgenstein's discussion of the non-formalizable human ability to perceive an individual case as being or not being an instance of a paradigm case (7), in experimental psychologists' discussions of strategies by which people learn visual forms (as in the case where a child first learns to identify a squirrel as a strange-looking cat) (8), in traditional studies of simile and metaphor, in which one treats of the ways in which any perceived or believed-to-be-typical property of the vehicle can contribute to the tenor. and in various recent works on vagueness in linguistic categorizations by such diversely motivated researchers as hkoff (9) and Zadeh (10).
2 .
A second aspect to the spirit of the times that I am trying to characterize is the notion of frame or schema. One early use of the term in a linguistic setting was my own, in the expression case frame;but it is also used by various writers in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, sometimes with reference to the notion of the case frame as the source. The idea, under various names, goes back at least as far as the schemata idea of Bartlett (1 l) and has recent elaborations in the work of Minsky (12) and Winograd (l 3); I see it also in the associative relations idea of the psychologist Bower (14).
In proposing the ideas of case grarnmar (l 5), I thought of the case frame associated with a particular predicating word as the imposition of structure on an event (or on the conceptualization of an event) in a fixed way and with a given perspective. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. We recognize in what we might call a commercial event such facts as that: two people are active, and each of the two performs two acts, the buyer that of taking the goods and that of surrendering the money, the seller that of taking the money and that of surrendering the goods. And yet the case frames require that any single predication describing aspects of the commercial event is limited in the penpective on the event which can be taken and in the ways in which particular participants in the event can be given a grammatical role in the associated sentence.
For example, in a sentence like
John bought the sandwich from Henry for three dollars.
one of the two activities of the buyer is registered, those of the seller are not, mention of the seller and the money is optional, and - in some sense -the event is viewed from -the perspective of -the buyer. In -the sentence Henry sold John the sndwich for three dollars
an activity ofthe seller is registered, those ofthe buyer are not, mention of the buyer and the money is optional, and the perspective is that of the seller, In
John paid Henry three dollars for the sandwich
one of the activities of the buyer is mentioned, the activity of the seller is not, and (in context) the mention of the goods is optional. And in the sentence
The vndwich cost John three dolhrs
the perspective has changed again; and this particular predicate provides no
easy way to include mention of the seller. i
What is important to realize about the case frames is that they presuppose a fairty complete understanding ofthe nature ofthe total transaction or activity, and that they determine a particular perspectival anchoring among the entities involved in the aötivity. A complete description of the prototypical commercial event would have to mention goods, money, the money system, the two human-participant roles, the two transfers of ownerships, and so on. There happens not to be any simple one-clause way of representing all of the aspects of an entire commercial event. We must distinguish, in other words, two different 'levels' of conceptual
frameworks for events: the one giving a general representation of all of the essential aspects of events of a particular category; and the other giving the particular perspective on an ev€nt of the type dictated by a case frame.
A general understanding of a particular event tupe - such as that of the commercial act - cante thought of as providing the setting within which specific notions related to this act can be specified or defined. The idea is similar to what is found in the pirilosopher Hanson's discussion of the problem ofdefining the word aorta (6). The procedure for getting somebody to understand the word uorta - a word that cannot be defined in a purely formal or categorial way - is to present him with an instance of, a replica of, the circulatory system of some typical mammal, to point out to him a certain portion of this system, to explain how that portion is related to the rest, and to tell him that this is called theaorta.In the case of a word like, say, merchanf, the procedure is to present somebody with a
description of, or a prototypical instance of, a commercial act; and then to point to one of the individuals involved in this act and to say that he is the merchant. The same would hold for explanations of the verbs used for describing aspects of a commercial act. For example, I can point to the goods I can then draw your attention to the amount of money that got exchanged, and I can then say something like
This cost three dollurs
as a way of getting you to understand the meaning of the word cost
The alternative that I would like to reject is that of building into the description of each vocabulary item that figures in the description of a commercial act, information about all aspects of the act. In a sense, what I am proposing contains, in the long run, the same information: but it allows a more gestalt-like conception of the nature of the commercial event. In other words, if we know in one way or another what the commercial event is, then, given that knowledge, we can know exactly what the vocabulary pertaining to that semantic domain means. In short, I can believe of myself that I know exactly what is meant by such words as buy, sell, Wy or cosf, without requiring of myself that I have a complete and correct checklist description of the commercial event itself.
(In recent years I have not had much to say about my proposals on case grammar or about the many extensions, improvements and corrections of it that have been proposed. A famous critic of heretical linguistic theories once described case grammar as a mere notational variant of a more familiar linguistic theory, differing from the latter in especially the one important respect that the latter was correct. My own silence on the subject may have been taken, I fear, as an embrassed withdrawal. My feeling is that, independently of whether what I was proposing was notationally expressible within some other system, the important points -some of which I think had not been made before - were those that had to do with the frame analyses that the system of cases could be used to define, and with certain claims about dependencies and hierarchical relations that seemed to obtain among the terms in this system. Actually the reason that I have pulled back is the same as the reason I get dissatisfied with a filing system for my notes when I suddenly become aware that the box labeled "MISCELLANEOUS" contains more than all the rest. There were just too many things I could not account for. I have not, in fact, given up on case grammar; but I think I need to become clearer about the difference between the perspectival or orientational
frames that the system of cases allows, and the frameworks of roles and categories in terms of which it is possible to describe the vast range of actions and scenes and experiences that human beings are familiar with).
3.
Athird aspect of the Zeitgeist is the current interest in text analysis. Text lingusitics is becoming increasingly popular, and increasingly important, both in Europe and in the United States. It seems to me that approaches to the analysis of discourse that do more than assign to sample texts a kind of architectonic structure - expressible as a subtle and detailed table of contents for the text - can not tell us very much, and that in particular some means must be devised for analyzing the temporal development of the comprehension process of a discourse. Brute force ways that simply provide a notation for indexing individuals or time points or observation points, or that indicate topical continuity or topic change, or tllat provide labels for the semantic or rhetorical connections between successive portions of the text, are useful and make text linguists sensitive to many aspects ofthe comprehension procegs; but they do not do enough. Successful text analysis has got to provide an understanding of the development on the part of the interpreter of an image or scene or picture of the world that gets created and filled out between the beginning and the end of the text-interpretation experience. One way of talking about the process is this: The first part ofthe text activates an image or scene of some situation in the mind of the interpreter;later parts of the text fill in more and more information about that situation, give it a history, give it a motivation, embed it in other scens or situations, and so on. In other words what happens when one comprehends a text is that one mentally creates a kind of world; the properties of this world may depend quite a bit on the individual interpreter's own private experiences - a reality which should account for part ofthe fact that different people construct different interpretations of the same text. As one continues with the text, the details ofthis world get filled in, expectations get set up which are later fulfilled or thwarted or left hanging, and there are such experiences as surprise, suspense, disappontment, and so on, experiences which can be at least partly explained by a description of the temporal development of the interpretation experience.
4.
With all of the above as introduction,let me try to formulate, in a regrettably imprecise way, the picture I have formed of the
communication and comprehension processes. It seems to me that our knowledge of any linguistic form is available to us, in the first instance, in connection with some personally meaningful setting or situation. Because of the fact that it is personally meaningful its recurrence - or the
occurrence later on of something similar to it - will be recognized.
The argument can be made that a language-learning child first learns labels for whole situations, and only later learns labels for individual objects. A child might flrst associate the word pencil, for example, with the
experience of himself sitting in a particular room with his mother drawing circles; later on he becomes able to identify and label isolable parts of such an experience - the pencil, the paper, the act of drawing, etc.; still later he acquires different names for the parts of different but similar scenes -drawing, printing, writing, sketching, pencil, pen, crayon, chalk, paper, blackboard, schoolhouse walls, etc.; and in the end he finds himself with a mature repertory of syntagmatic, paradigmatic and hierarchical frames for experiences of both greater degrees of abstractness änd greater degrees of precision and boundedness than the original experience in which he first encountered the word pencil.
It appears, then, that in meaning acquisition, first one has labels for whole scenes or experiences, then one has labels for isolable parts ofthese, and finally one has both a repertory of labels for schematic or abstract scenes and a repertory oflabels for entities perceived independently of the scenes in which they were first encountered.
(Once in a while one comes across a nice piece of evidence about the middle stage of this development. Mary Erbaugh, a graduate student in the Berkeley linguistics department, working in Oakland in the summer of 1974 with some small children, brought a grapefruit in her lunch one day; she strowed the grapefruit to the children, and got an acknowledgment from thern that the object was indeed a grapefruit; she then peeled it and separated it into its segments and started eating it. She reports that the chjldren around seven years old in this group were surprised to learn that what at first had looked like a grapefruit turned out to be an orange. Guessing at their reasoning, it would seem that a grapefruit, after all, is something you cut in half with a knife and eat with a spoon. This thing was obviously an orange, not a grapefruit. The categorizing function of these words had not yet been liberated from the scene of people in their experience eating the fruit.)
kaving explanations and justifications for another occasion, I would like now to present, by demonstration, some of the ways in which I would like to use the notions I have been trying to suggest. I witl try not to feel too embarassed by the reality that all of this may sound at first like naive arm-chair psychology and that I cannot always think of ways in which one could decide what sorts ofpsychological evidence could be brought to bear in justifying this way of talking.
I want to say that people, in learning a language, come to associate certain scenes with certain linguistic frames. I intend to use the word scene - a word I am not completely happy with - in a maximally general sense, to include not only visual scenes but familiar kinds of interpersonal
transactions, standard scenarios, familiar layouts, institutional structures, enactive experiences, body image; and, in general, any kind of coherent segment, large or small, of human beliefs, actions, experiences, gr imaginings. I intend to use the word frame for referring to any system of linguistic choices (the easiest cases being collections of words, but also including choices of grammatical rules or grammatical categories - that can get associated with prototypical instances of scenes. The distinction between scene and frame that I am trying to make appears to be like the distinction between schema and description that Bobrow and Norman make (17), and appears to correspond, confusingly, to two hierarchical levels of the notion frame in Minsky's work (18).
I would like to say that scenes and frames, in the rninds of people who have learned the associations between them,activate each other; and that, furthermore, frames are associated in memory with other frames by virtue of shared linguistic material, and-that scenes are associated with other scenes by virtuq" of sameness or similarity of the entities or relations or substances in them or their contexts of occurrence.
The scenes that I havefn mind can be relatively simple or relatively complex: thus, writing is simpler üran letter witing , and letter writing is simpler than carrying on a correspondence . The frames that are activated by these scenes, and which activate these scenes, are correspondingly simple or complex.
I would like to be able to speak of a process of abstraction, which consists in developing schematic scenes with some of the positions 'left blank', so to speak. Thus, whatever the experiential origin, scenes associated with
writing-in-general contain, in the adult, less specific entities than mothers and pencils and little boys.
- L
I would like to be able lo say that scenes and frame are mutually retrievable, meaning that a scene can activate its associated frame and a frame can activate its associated scene.
5 .
kt me illustrate some of these notions first in a discussion of the process of comprehending a discourse, the process of interpreting language in context. The simplest way to look at this process is to consider discourse coherence relations in a two-party conversation, We can examine some elementary'two-stroke' conversations, of not very greal naturalness, involving the notion of witing.
The Japanese verb kaku and the English verb write are frequently acceptable translations of each other, but the scene-and-frame analysis of the two words shows them to be partly different. For the Japanese word, the associated scene is one of somebody guiding a pointed traceJeaving implement across a surface, as with the English word;but in the case of the Japanese word, the nature of the resulting trace is left more or less unspecified. Thus, if somebody were to ask,
Nani o kakimasita ka?
(meaning "What did you kaku? "), the answer can identify a word or sentence or character, or, just as well, a sketch or a circle or a dooble.
The English verb write also has this same scene associated with it, for which we can assign a framework of concepts identifying such entities as the writer; the implement; the surface on which the traces are left; and the product. Since I know at least that much about writing,I know that if you tell me that you have been writing, I can, talking within the frame that you have introduced into our conversation, ask you such questions as
llhat did you write? llhat did you write on? What did you wite with?
(Notice that if, instead, I were to ask a question lke lilhat time is it? or make a comment lke I've got a bad toothache, I would not be talking within the frame you introduced;I would be changing the subject).
The English verb write , unlike the Japanese verb kaku, has an additional
scene associated with it, for which there is what we might call a language frame. It happens that the product of an act of witing cannot be a picture or a smear, but has to be something linguistic. Because of the existence of. this second frame, articulated with the first, I can then ask, talking within one of the frames your remark has introduced into our conversation, such questions as these:
What languge were you writing in? What does what you wrote mean?
The word write , tn other words, simultaneously activates both an action scene of a particular kind and a linguistic communication scene; the fittingness of successive parts of the text can be judged by appealing to either of these two frames
Suppose now that your sentence about writing gives some name to the product of the wt'iting; you will then have introduced a still neq frame, the one (or ones) associated with the new lexical material you have introduced. For instance, if you tell me that you have been writing a letter,youhave introduced into our conversation what might be called a correspondeqce frame. Now free to talk within that frame, I can ask you questions like
Wo are you writing to? When are you going to send it? When do you think she will get it? Do you think she will answer it?
and so on. Or - going further still - if you tell me that you have written another letter, then we have a historical frame going, and it is now appropriate for me - assuming that I do not already know the historical setting for you remark - to ask you such questions as
How many earlier letters did you write? Iilho did you send those letters to? and so on.
/
Textual coherence cannot be determined on the basis of single sentences and the scenes activated by the frames triggered by their lexical and grammatical content. The examples given so far treated these reports (about you having written something) as first contributions to a two-party conversation whose participants do not know very much about each other. If, however, I already have 'activated' certain scenes about you - if, for example, I know that you are in the finishing stages of preparing a paper on Latvian palatalized consonants - and if, in that context, you say to me
merely that you have been writing, I can then quite appropriately ask you a question like.
Have you dectded what journal you're going to send it to?
In this case, I was able to fit what you said to me into some scenes that were already previously activated; and I can therefore appropriately talk within any of the frarnes associated with parts of that larger complex scene.
Two'line conversations are, of course, extremely simple kinds of 'texts'. In general, single-author texts or more extensive conversations, will have analogous kinds of coherence properties. In each case, a text is coherent to the extent that its successive parts contribute to the construction of a single (possibly quite complex) scene.
The process of communication involves the activation, within speakers and across speakers, of linguistic frames and cognitive scenes. communicators operate on these scenes and frames by means of various kinds of
procedures, cognitive acts such as filling in the blanks in schematic scenes, comparing presented real-world scenes with prototypical scenes, and so on. The concepts needed for discussion ofthese operations include real-world scenes, prototypic scenes, linguistic frames for scenes or parts of scenes, perspectives or orientations within scenes provided by the kinds of frames known as case frames, and a set ofprocedures or cognitive operations such as comparing, matching, filling in, and so on.
6.
It is reasonable to wonder why it is necessary to have two categories, i.e., both scene and frame, where one might be considered sufficient. The reason I distinguish the two is that very often there are perfectly well understood aspects of scenes, even quite familiar scenes, for which the speaker, or a given speaker, has no linguistic encoding options within the frame that is most directly activated by that scene. wallace chafe has given the example of the trafjic cone or trafflc pilon,the orange cone-shaped object that is used by highway patrol people and highway workmen for stopping or rerouting traffic. Everybody knows what they are, what their function is, and what they look like, but only a fairly small proportion of the population knows what to call them. When a person learns the name of this object, the scene does not change, only the associatecl frame.
An example from my own experience is the scene of an intersection with a stoplight. Sometimes you get a green light allowing you to turn left under the condition that the oncoming traffic is required to stop. I have been familiar with this situation for many years, but I only recently learned. a way of talking about it. It happened when I heard someone say Oh good. they've got a protected left turn'here now.The scene, again, has not changed for me;only the associated frame which that scene activates.
7 .
Now it happens that all of this could be talked about in other terms than those I have been offering, in ways that are more formal and respectable. This is especially true if we have a rich collection of semantic markers and semantic distinguishers and presuppositional devices, and if we can have an unlimited number of distinct predicates, one for each aspect of each sc-ene that we might have something to say about as speakers of a language. Yet I think, as I suggested earlier, that the scenes-and-frames view of'meaning is superior to checklist theories ofmeaning in the kinds ofresearch that seem important and in the sensibleness with which issues in the theory of meaning can be formulated.
As an example of this last point, let me take the in some circles highly valued search for a core meaning or Grundbedeutung of a linguistic form, a search I see as based on the commitment to reduce all appearances of ambiguity to a minimum. Katz and Fodor have made us all aware (19) of the various meanings of the English noun bachelor: one being unmarried adult male human being;anolher being a knight beaing the banner of another knight; a third beinga young male fur seal without o rltete duing the mating seasor. Roman Jakobson has reportedely argued that this is an unnecessary d,isplay of ambiguity, and that the three meanings can all be subsumed under a single formulation, namely: unfulfilled in a typical rnale role.
Men who choose not to marry, or who are at the age when they might marry but have so far been unlucky or too busy, have a special status that distinguishes them from many other men their age. This is a special enough status to deserve a name: and the name is bachelor. The male fur seal wants to have as many sexual partners as he can manage, and if he is big and strong and has a loud voice, he will be able to keep the younger and weaker males away from his breeding territory. The seals who have this special rejected status deserve, for the observing ethologist, a special name:
and once again, the name is bachelor.It happens that the same word is used in both of these settings; but I think it is misleading to separate a word from its context just for the sake of capturing in one fomulation the common features of these two kinds of scenes. It is misleading, that is, if we are trying to capture by the semantic description of a word what it is that a speaker of the language needs to know in order to use the word appropriately.
I would prefer to say that what Jakobson has expressed is the similarity on the basis of which some zoologist created a name for the lonely young seals (viewed as part of the act of creating a linguistic frame for the scene of fur seal society): he borrowed the word bachelor from a different frame on the basis of analogy. It is simply not the case, as the Jakobsonian analysis would suggest, that the meaning of the word bachelor was extended or made more general; the attempt to support such a claim, after all, would require the semanticist to find a realTy general boundary condition that could cover exactly the things that are calledbachelors. There are genuine cases of lexical-meaning generalization, and we certainly need a kind of analysis that will enable us to distinguish those from the spurious cases such as those we see in the polysemy of bachelor.
8 .
Another issue in semantic theory that I think the scene-and-frame analysis can shed some light on is the question of determining the boundary conditions of semantic categories, a question discussed earlier in
connection with Labov's study. Typically this sort ofresearch is a part of the work of scholars who regard the meaning of a linguistic form as best expressed in terms of an exhaustive checklist of the conditions that must be satisfied in order for one to be able to say that the word has been appropriately used. Boundary research on our word bachelor in its most familiar sense raises such questions as these:
How old does a male human have to be before he can reasonsbly be called a buchelor?
Is somebody who is professionally committed to the single W considered u bachelor? Is
it right to say, for example, that Pope John XXIII died u bachelor?
When we wy of a widower or a divorced man that he is now a bachelor, are we speaking literally or metaphorically? I,lhat tests sre there
for knowing which it is?
Is bqchelorhood a state one can enter? If a piest left the piesthood in middle life, could we correctly descibe his situation by saying thot he became a bachelor at age 47?
If people give different answers to these questions, do they speak different diqlects?
Are these dialects stable? How do they get learned?
and so on.
These are all reasonable questions, given the checklist theory of meaning. A prototype theory of meaning might phrase things quite differently. The concept bachelor is well-defined in a kind of prototype world which is simpler in manylrespects than the real, familiar world. In this pSototype world, people typically marry around a certain age, and if they marry they stay married. If they do not marry, there is something aberrant about them: either they are unlucky, or th.9V don't like women, or they avoid the constraints marriage would impose on their personal freedom. Their Iifeways differ markedly from those of their married age peers, justifying their categorization. The thing to notice about this prototype is that it simply does not cover all cases.
When a linguist is asking an informant to explore the boundary conditions of a word, he is actually asking the informant to make judgments that are not provided for by his understanding ofthe word as that is based on the associated prototypic scene. The informant, instead, is being asked to make judgments about whether lre is willing to extend a frame that he associates with,a familiar and well-defined scene to a situation for which he does not have a frame; or he is being asked to decide whether he is willing to create a new frame for the new scene using a given word from a different frame; or he-is being asked whether he has already confronted this problem and made a decision. This research is particularly tricky, since the linguist may be confronting the informant with a situation that is not personally meaningful for him, with a situation, that is, which does not call on the informant's actual communicating, expressive, or classifying needs.
Another example of the same point is provided by the word widow. Boundary research on this word would consider such questions as these:
Would you call a woman a widow who murde:red her husband?
l|ould you call a woman a widow whose divorce became final on the doy her husband died? Would you call a woman a widow who had lost two of her three husbqnds but who hud one living one left?
Given the checKist theory of meaning, these are all reasonable questions. Within a prototype theory of meaning, however, we might say that the concept widow is a concept that finds its place within a simple
prototypical scene in which people marry as adults. they marry one person forlife, they marry at most one person, and theirlives are seriously affected by their partner's death. This prototypic scene simply does not cover all possible cases of a woman marrying a man and then at some later time being predeceased by him.
9 .
This process, which I have suggested is a common part of practically all uses of language, of applying a frame that is associated in advance with one scene to a novel scene, is importantly involved in the kind of
communicalive act known as metaphor. Because of this fact, there are those who might be inclined to say that every instance of speaking is an instance of metaphor. I would rather say that metaphor consists in using, in connection with one scene, a word - or perhaps a whole frame - that is known by both speaker and hearer to be more fundamentally associated with a different frame. The requirement for a true metaphor is that the interpreter is simultaneously aware of both the new scene and the original scene.
If the new scene already has a frame of its own, then we have an instance of what we might call a wasteful metaphor, as found in the device of calling a camel a ship of the desert.If the new scene lacks such a frame, then we have what we might call efficient metaphor; instances of efficient metaphor in the history of our languages might be seen in the decision to use the terminology of spatial relationships in talking about time or in talking about the organization and functioning of the huam mind.
(Obviously I have not made all the distinctions that need to be made. I have simplified matters, for example, by saying that the speaker and the
hearer must both be aware of the two ranges of application of the
expression. If metaphoring is viewed as a cognitive act, we must distinguish metaphor for the coiner from metaphor for the user form metaphor for the interpreter.)
1 0 .
Another common semantic issue related to the question of the fit between a frame and a scene is the ncition of selection restrictions. Careful
discussions of word meanings have considered, all the way back, the difference between what might be called the meaning proper of a word and its range. of application. Expressed in our terms, the selection restriction information about the use.of a word can be stated as a specification of the nature of the appropriate scene. The concept of selection restriction as it is usually viewed in linguistics defines it as a relationship among the elements of a frame, not as a relationship between a frame and its associated scene.
When we are talking in English about vertical measures of an erect object, and when that erect object is a human being, the scalar words we use are tsll and short . When we are talking about the vertical distance of some object from a bottom base line - such an object as a bird in flight or a branch in a tree - the scalar terms we use are high and /ow. Given the setting in which we are concerned with the vertical extent of buildings, the words we use are tall and low.
Now to some extent, of course, it would be possible to associate these distributional facts with the properties of other words in the associated frames (as Bierwisch and others have done (20) ), but to me that seems like disguising what is really going on. Instead of recording separately, with each noun like cloud, tree, branch, uwn, building, etc., the dimensional and orientational features on the basis of which the correct measurement words can be selected, it seems more appropriate to describe the different kinds of situations andto present the grading words that are used in each of these.
(A related question, one that is sometimes considered within and sometimes without the proper domain of linguistic semantics, has to do with the proper irrterpretation of word association data. The generally accepted view among linguists, I believe, is that word-association data have more to do with experiences in people's life histories than with the
of linguistic semantics. What I am suggesting here, however, is that linguistic semantics cannot be properly separated from an examination of people's experiences with language in context; and so maybe the two areas of interest are not all that disparate. If, thus, the lexical items we use in our language are essentially items with classifying and describing functions within familiar settings, then there is no critical difference between the two interests. When I hear a word - if the frame and scene theory is correct - I activate in my memory one of the scenes within which I know how to use the word, as well as the rest of the frame which contains the word for that scene. If schematic frames are actualized, as is likely in an adult, then other words which can 'fill the blanks' - i.e. elements of a paradigmatic frame - come to mind. I have not suggested a way of researching word association data;but it does seem to me that notions of meaning and language comprehension should somehow be discussable within the same framework as word associations).
i l .
I have been sayin$ that we need for semantic theory some notion of scenes;that scenes can be partly described in terms of the linguistic frames with which they are associated; and that scenes and frames, in addition to being cognitively linked with each other, are likewise linked with other scenes and other frames, in such a way that, in their totality, they characterize the perceived and imagined world and the whole framework of linguistic categories for talking about imaginable worlds.
The word scene that Ihave been using, as I have already stressed, is by no means to be associated solely with the prototypic meaning of that word. Some of the things I would like to call scenes are like that, however, such as the scenes of the flora and fauna of one's garden, the artifacts in one's kitchen, the observable parts of the human body, and so on. Others are closer to a cinematic sense of scene, with its dynamic aspect - such things as a person eating, a child drawing a picture, people engaged in acts of commerce, and so on. Other scenes, in my sense, might contain things that would not be visible in a'visual'scene: in this case we have something corresponding to the stage-direction sense of scene, whereby it could be imagined that a closed box has candy in it, or that somebody is hiding behind a curtain. Other examples of three-dimensional scenes that cannot be perceived all at once are the location and distribution of the internal organs of the human body, or the shape of a pretzel.
Other scenes are farther away still from the prototype. In some cases to understand a word we have to understand a history;and here by history I mean merely some understanding of a particular path of development in time, past or future or general. Examples of words whose interpretations require the understanding ofhistorical scenes are scar (21), which is not just the name of a feature of the surface of somebody's skin, but is the healing state of a wound; widow, which refers to a woman who was once married but whose husband has died;mufti,wlich designates ordinary clothes, but ordinary clothes worn by somebody who professionally wears a military uniform;and so on. Others might be slightly more complicated. An apple core is not a particular well-defined portion of an apple, such that nature has provided the seam between the apple-core and the rest of the apple. An apple-core is that part of the apple that somebody who eats apples the way most of us do has left uneaten. In order to understand the word, you have to know how people in our culture eat apples. There would simply be nb need for such a word in a community in whjch people typically ate the entire apple, either swallowing or spitting out the seeds. A placebo, to give another example, is not something that has characteristics of its own, but is an innocent substance given to the control group in an experiment testing the effectiveness öf some new medicine, or is a substance given deceptively as medicine to a group of subjects to find out how they are affected by believing that they are taking medicine. There is no way of understanding the meaning of the word without having a notion of the whole experimental setting;
Other scenes involve a understanding of conditions. There is no
identifiable characteristic of poison apart from the reality that when living beings - or maybe only certain living beings - ingest them, they die or are otherwise seriously harmed. A wound is not just any non-typical interruption inJhe integument-of some living being, but is in particular something which hinders the being's effectiveness or well-being.
Other scenes have to.do with body image - such things as knowing zp, down, left, ight, front and back. These are all concepts that we could not have formed if we did not have bodies;these are concepts that could not have developed in a purely spiritual universe that contained purely spiritual beings.
Related to the body image scene are scenes of what bodies can do - these scenes differing, ofcourse, depending on what kinds ofbodies we are
talking about. Dependent on such scenes are our understanding ofverbs like walk, stand, gallop, crawl, frown, smile, vomit, as well as nouns like lap, fist, and so on.
Other body-dependent scenes have to do with experiences that the physical body is capable of: such things as hunger, nausea, fever, wakefulness, and hesrtbum. Still other scenes relate to psychic
experiences: on these depend such notions as anger, fear, andwakefulness. More complex than these are psychic experience that have histories: things like: impatience, suspense, surprise, disappontment, etc. Knowing these words is not just knowing the character of the associated emotions per se, but is knowing what sorts of events could create the emotional
experiences. Impatience, for example, is the way somebody feels who believes something is going to happen, who wants it to happen soon, but is powerless to rnake it happen. Disappointment is the way somebody feels who had wanted something to happen, who had reason to believe that it was going to happen, but who has found out that it wasn't going to happen. In order for us to have an understanding of these words, we have to have experienced such feelings as wanting, expecting, etc., and we also have to understand the characteristic historical features of the associated sceies.
Still other scenes involve not just visual or experiential memories of image, but require an understanding of the kinds of actions and events whose purposes and characters are determined by institutions, conventions, agreements, contracts, etc. Here I have in mind such notions asbuy, sell, promise, borrow, gßrqntee, strike, negotiate, eLc.
A still different kind of scene, one which frequently interlinks with the other by means of lexical items or grammatical choices, is sornething we might refer to as an interactional scene. Such scenes involve perceptions of the social realities of the setting in which talking is being carried out: such things as the age, sex, social status, or institutional roles ofthe
participants; the friendliness or aloofness ofthe interaction; the speech act force of the individual contributions to the interaction: and so on.
12.
Given these new understandings, let me retum once again to questions of communication and comprehension. The linguistic choices made explicit by the speaker activale certain scenes in the interpreter's repertory of
scenes, and as the linguistic data continue to be produced and processed, these original scenes get linked into larger scenes, their'blanks' get filled in, and perspectives within them are assumed. The all-important role of the notion of prototypic scenes in this process consists in the fact that much of this linking and filling-in activity depends, not on information that gets explicitly coded in the linguistic signal, but on what the interpreter knows about the larger scenes that this material activates or creates. Such knowledge depends on experiences and memories that the interpreter associates with the scenes that the text has introduced into his consciousness.
In a text like the following one,
I haci trouble with the car yesterday. The carburetor was dirty. We have no difficulty in dealing with the definite noun phrase in the second sentence (that is, we have no trouble figuring out which of the world's carburetors is here being described as dirty) because the bcene created by linking lhe car and carburetor scenes together was one which easily provided an anchoring frame for the carburetor. The interactional scene for this text needs to be one which indicates something of what is going on in the production of the text. In this case the second sentence can be understood as an explanation, or further specification, ofthe message given with the first sentence. On the other hand, in a text like this one
I had trouble with the car yesterday. The ash-tray was dirty.
we can easily figure out a connection between the mentioned car and the rhentioned ash-tray;but this time our scenes about having trouble with a car do not really provide any way ofinterpreting the second sentence. The lack of coherence for this second text seems to be determined by our inability to figure out any single coherent event scene that includes both of these situations linked purposefully to each other.
1 3 .
Let us look again at some traditional semantic problems. Consider this time the two sentences,
A dog was barking. A hound was baying.
It is clear that certain collocational expectations are satisfied with these sentences that would not be satisfied with having the nouns and verbs re-matched;and yet the collocational preference is not so strong that one could say that these new sentences were semantically anomalous, The
difference cannot, in other words, be spoken of as something accountable in terms of selection restrictions.
A scene-and-frame analysis would have it that in a particular kind of hunting-dog scene associated with the activity of hunting the animal in the scene is labeled hound and the special kind ofbarking that this kind of animal performs is called baying.It would be altogether misleading, it seems to me, to express these directly as collocational facts about words or as selection restriction facts about the semantic properties of words.
14.
Let me go back again to the problem of looking for a maximally general description of the meaning of a word. I mentioned earlier that tall and short were used for humans that high and low were used for talking about distance upward from a base line, and that tall and low were used for vertical measures of buildings. Looking at these facts and deriving from them a general description oflow and a general description of tall thal covered just the right cases would be misleading. It would be misleading because it would have to be formulated independently of the distinct scenes in which these words exist as members of contrast sels. In the same way, I think it would be misleading to define short with a single statement that covered both its use as the polar opposite of tall and its use as the polar opposite of long.
1 5 .
Arguments that in general words should be thought of in connection with the contexts in which they function can be found, I think, in the facts that words sometimes undergo separate historical changes or become subject to different morphological processes as members of different frames. The best-known example of this is the double plural of brother, namely brothers and brethren. Conceivably a unitary definition of brother could be given which covers its biological-family and its religious-community senses together; but then the reference to the separate contexts would have to be brought in for describing the pluralization phenomena.
An example of this same sort of phenomenon that I have recently become aware of is with the adjective live.In the original scene we have the living vs. dead or the living vs. non-living contrast. When associated with this basic scene, the adjective has the formlive prenominally but the form alive in predicate position. That is, we say:
Those me live lobsters. Those lobsters are ulive.
We can see as an event in the history of our language that the living vs. dead frame has been extended, metaphorically, to manners, personality, speech, etc.; but in this new scene, the formalive is used in both syntactic contexts, at least in American English. That is, we say:
Her mnnner is very alive. She has a very alive manner.
The same frame has also been extended to the situation in which what is being contrasted is the difference between a performer's being or not being physically present for a performance, i.e., whether the performer in an entertainment is on stage himself or is being presented on film or by audio recording. As a member of this contrast set, the adjective has the lorm live in both syntactic contexts. Thus:
His performance wus live. He gave o live performance.
(In this third use the word appears to be undergoing some further change. Since I believed until recently that in its third use the adjective was applied to performances rather than to performers, I was upset when I read a San Francisco Chronicle advertisement.of a theater that offers to that city a stage full of live naked girls. The point was, I guess, that their customers will see actual three-dimensional bodies rather than images on a screen;but the only contrast set that I had for prenominal live as apphed to persons suggested more horrible possibilities).
16.
Another frequently discussed issue in semantic theory is the existence or noncxistence of synonymy, in particular of complete synonymy. Some linguists take t}te non-existence of synonymy as axiomatic, and build parts of their semantic theories on that principle. Others take it as a convenient working hypothesis, so that one focus of research is simply that of trying to find out what meaning differences can be discovered between two apparently synonymous expressions. Others feel that the existence of synonymy should be left open. In their view, if there are reliable ways of giving semantic descriptions to lexical items independently, then it will turn out that if there iue any synonyms, there will be pairs of items having identical semantic descriptions.
'78
If we see the notion of lexical meaning as inextricably tied up with the notion of the fit between lefcal frames and their associated scenes, then claims about synonymy take on slightly different interpretations. In claims about the non-existence of synonymy we might meal, for example, that there are indistinguishable scenes for which the associated frame offers lexical options. The famous case of furze and gorse (Quine's examples, I believe) might fit this description. Or we might mean that the same object (necessarily the same object, I mean) is labeled in one way for one scene and in another way for another scene, as, for example, is probably true with pork and the flesh of dead pigs. Or we might mean that the same cognitive scene is associated with two different linguistic frames, but the interactional scenes are different: as might be the case withweewee and uinate , or German Leu and Löwe . It is my impression that the prototypic concept ofsynonymy does not cover these cases, and that therefore any semanticist is free to use the term synonymy in any of these cases, or to withhold it from the second and third cases.
Linguistics obviously does not need a priori decisions about synonymy. The non-existence claims might actually express an intuition about a natural tendency that speakers have to avoid synonymy. For example, in the borderline or overlap area of the Northern and Southern U.S. pronunciations of greasy, speakers have alternative ways ofsaying the same thing. My understanding of what happens in these areas is that the two pronunciations sort themselves out into separate frames, one having to do with the literal use of the word, one with its metaphoric use. Thus: That's a greqgy poL
He's a greagt old man.
The no-synonymy insight, then, is one about the tendency for
distinguishable frames to be paired with distinguishable scenes. The insight about there not being synonyms is seen as an insight about the nature of the frame-to-scene mapping.
l 7
I am convinced that something like the model I have been talking about can allow an integrated view of many subfields in the study of meaning and comprehension. In the same conceptual framework we can discuss word meanings, the speech-act function of making particular linguistic choices, the acquisition of meaning in the child, changes of word meanings in the history of the language, the process of communicating in general,
79
the process of comprehending a text, the teaching of meaning in second-language education, and so on. It is not easy to see how these notions can be formalized or how a. scenes-and-frames semantics can be linked up with a generative grammar. These pages amount to no more than a tentative first step in seeking a solution to certain problems in semantic theory within the framework of concepts that seems to be emerging in a number of disciplines touching on human thought and behavior.
References
1. BERLIN, B. and KAY, P.,Basic Color Terms, Their Untversatity and
Evolution, University of California Press, 1969.
2, ROSCH, E., "Natural categories", Cognitive Prychology 4, (1973), pp.
328-350.
3. LABOV, W., "The boundaries of words and their meanings", in C-J; N.
BAILEY and R. SHUY, (eds.),.Mew htays of Arulyzing Variation in English, Georgetown University Press, 1 973.
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5. BRUNER, J., "The course of cognitive growth",,4moican Psychologßt 19,
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6. LINDSAY, R., "Inferential memory as the basis of machines which
understand natural thought", in E. A. FEIGENBAÜM and J. FELDMAN, Computers and Thought, McGraw HiU, 1963.
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1VOODWORTH,R. S.,Experimental Psychology, Henry Holt, 1938, p. 73. LAKOFF, G. P,, "Hedges: a study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts",in Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting, Chicago Lingpßtic Society, University of Chicago Linguistics Depaftment,I972, '
ZADEH, L., "Quantitative fuzzy semantics",Information Sciences 3, (1971), pp.159-t76.
BARTLETI, Sn F., Remembering: A stndy in Experimental and Social Psychologt, Cambridge University Pres, 1932, p. 199.
MINSKY, }L, "A framework for representing knowledge", in Artificial Intelligence Memo No. 306, M.I.T. &tilicial Intelligence Labontory,1974. WINOGRAD, T., "Frame representations and the declarative/procedural
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d
15. t 6 . t 7 .FILLMORE, C. J., "The case for case", in E. BACH an<l R. HARMS, (eds.),
Universaß in Lingaßtic Theory, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, (1968), pp. 1-90.
HANSON N. R., Perception and Dßcovery: An Introduction to Scientitic Inquiry, Freeman, Cooper & Co., 1969, p. 30.
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MINSKY, M.,op. cit..
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Many of these examples are taken from R. N. HANSON, op. cir.
I 18. 19. 20.
2r.
tRefddc€8 15. FILLMORE. C. r., -I1le @se fo! ce", ir E. AACS eit R EARMS, (e&.), UrlwMb rn Lingtßti. m@ry, Holt, Rinehdt and wlnrton, (1968), pp, 1-90, l. BERLIN, B. rnd KAY,P., Batb Colot TetN, meir tkite@liü dld
EDtutnrr, rhiwrlit of Griforia Prea, 1969. 16. HANSON N R., terept ot anat Discovery: A" Intrcduct'ü to Soehtifl.
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?. WITTOENSTEIN,L,?ftilotuphi@lh'cttlganonc,&condErtitid,M&ni[]rn, t954,23tr.
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ü@!rd', in Papac fum the Efughth Regiowl Meeting, Chi@go Litgui9tic Sdrrtr, Univ6sity of Chicago ringuisi.iG Deldtnmt, l9?2,
r0. zADEq, L, "Quuätatire tvzy tnnstiq",InJorwtloi Scierc$ 3, (197!t, p p . 1 5 9 - 1 7 5 .
11. EARII-ETT, Sü F., Am mbaing: A sludt i4 Erpe.imqtil anil S@idt ?r/.lolo&r, canbddse Uliv6ity Ptea, 1932, p. 199.
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controBy", ir D.G. DOBROW üd A. COLI,I]]S, (dr\, R.plerent4tto oül Un lqtlan lhg, i..Affiic Pr6s, r9?5, pp. 185-211.
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