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<br /><b>Infoling 2.32 (2014)</b><br />ISSN: 1576-3404 </font>
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<br /><hr /><b>Información general: </b><br />
Charles Fillmore, Discoverer of Frame Semantics, Dies in San Francisco
(California) at 84: He Figured Out How Framing Works<br /><b>URL:</b>
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/><b>Descripción</b><br /><p> <b>Charles Fillmore, Discoverer
of Frame Semantics, Dies in San Francisco (California) at 84: He
Figured Out How Framing Works<br />George Lakoff </b><br /><br
/>Charles J. Fillmore, one of the world’s greatest linguists —
ever — died last Thursday, February 13, at the age of 84 in San
Francisco. He was the discoverer of frame semantics, who did the
essential research on the nature of framing in thought and language.
He discovered that we think, largely unconsciously, in terms of
conceptual frames — mental structures that organize our thought.
Further, he found that every word is mentally defined in terms of
frame structures. Our current understanding of “framing” in social
and political discourse derives ultimately from his research, whose
importance stretches well beyond linguistics to social and political
thought — and all of intellectual life. The world has lost a scholar
of the greatest significance.<br /><br />“Chuck,” as he was known
throughout the linguistics world, got his PhD from the University of
Michigan in 1961 and taught at Ohio State University until 1971, when
he came to the University of California at Berkeley. Chuck’s wife of
40 years, Lily Wong Fillmore, put herself through college and then
through graduate school at Stanford, winding up as Professor of
Education at Berkeley. She was his constant companion, sounding board,
alter ego, the greatest cheer in his life, and much more.<br /><br
/>Chuck taught at Berkeley for 23 years until his retirement in 1994.
As a Professor Emeritus, he ran a research project on Frame Semantics
called FrameNet at the International Computer Science Institute at UC
Berkeley for 18 years until 2012, when he became ill.<br /><br />If
you are interested in how our understanding of framing in public
discourse developed, you need to know about Chuck.<br /><br
/>Chuck’s insights have had a profound effect on the fields of both
linguistics and cognitive science. As one of the earliest exponents of
Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar, Chuck discovered what is
known as the “transformational cycle” in 1963, even before Chomsky
came up with the idea of “deep structure.” My own relationship
with Chuck began in that year, when he came to speak on that topic at
the Indiana University Graduate Linguistics Club. Ever gracious, he
accepted my invitation as an officer of the club and drove all the way
from Columbus, Ohio to speak to our graduate students for nothing more
than an Indiana potluck dinner. I have revered him ever since, and our
lives and work have been intertwined over more than 50 years.<br /><br
/>By 1965, we both became convinced of the massive role of semantics
in grammar, but we came up with very different theories. My tack was
to introduce formal logic as semantics into linguistics in late 1963.
But Chuck, with greater insight, noticed that grammar is organized in
terms of the most basic experiences of everyday life, for example,
action and perception. He observed that such experiences have a basic
structure — wholes with parts: Thus an action can have Agents, their
Acts, Patients (what they act on), Purposes, Instruments, Locations,
Times, and so on. Perception involves an Experiencer, and experience,
a Stimulus of the Experience, and so on. He called these conceptual
elements of experience “cases” on an analogy with case languages
like Latin and Greek. He called his theory “Case Grammar,” showing
that there are rules of grammar that crucially make use of such very
general conceptual elements that structure our experience. I heard him
speak on the idea at MIT in the summer of 1965, and began following
his development of the theory. He published the idea in 1968, and the
idea spread. A version of that idea is now taken for granted pretty
much throughout the linguistic world, partly though Chuck’s work and
partly through a 1965 MIT dissertation by Jeff Gruber, who left
linguistics shortly thereafter to become a Baha’i missionary. In the
cognitive tradition following Chuck, they are called “semantic
roles.” In the generative tradition, they are called
“theta-roles.” The insights are similar and were discovered
independently at about the same time.<br /><br />Chuck arrived at
Berkeley in 1971, and I followed in 1972. We began working together,
as well as taking part in a cognition discussion group that included
Dan Slobin, Eleanor Rosch, Wally Chafe, Paul Kay, Steve Palmer, John
Gumperz, and occasionally, Paul Grice. That became the core of
cognitive science at Berkeley. When the field was formed later in the
1970’s, Berkeley became the West Coast center of the field. In
1974-75, while Chuck was developing frame semantics and I was helping,
we were regularly visited in my living room by three friends who drove
over from Palo Alto — Terry Winograd, Danny Bobrow, and Don Norman.
They wanted to find out what they could about the details of frame
semantics since they were working on a knowledge representation
language for computer science, which eventually developed into KL-ONE
— a classic frame-based knowledge representation language in
computer science. It was because of Chuck that it came to be
“frame-based.”<br /><br />In 1975, Chuck published his first paper
on frame semantics in the first issue of the Publications of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society, and in 1976 published a second version
in 1976 in The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Frame
semantics was a much-elaborated version of case grammar. Chuck had
been studying European linguistic research on “semantic fields”
— groups of related words like knife-fork-spoon, Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday, … and so on. Chuck realized that they were also based on
organized mental structures of common experiences, but he went a major
step further: the hypothesis that every word in every language is
mentally defined by elements of such mental structures, which he
called “frames.” Chuck’s classic example involved the semantic
field buy-sell-goods-price-cost. The common mental structure defining
such words is based on the commercial event scenario: Person 1 has
possessions and wants to exchange them for money. Person 2 has the
money and wants to exchange it for such a possession. There is mutual
exchange. Person 1 is called a seller; Person 2 is called a buyer; the
possession exchanged is called the goods; and the money is called the
price. Those named the basic “semantic roles” — the conceptual
elements of the frame.<br /><br />Being Chuck, he went further.
Sentences that looked very different have meanings characterized by
the same frame. Chuck sold the book to Paul for $10. Paul bought the
book from Chuck for $10. The book cost Paul $10. Chuck got $10 for the
book. Moreover, each verb defined by that frame has its own grammar
associated with it. With sell, the Seller is Subject, the goods is
direct object, the buyer is marked by to and the price is marker by
for. With cost, the goods is subject, the price is direct object and
the Buyer is indirect object.<br /><br />This is a very simple
example. There is a great deal more to frames. In the 18 years Chuck
worked on the FrameNet project, over a thousand frames were described
in detail. They are publicly accessible on the web at
www.framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu.<br /><br />The study of frame
semantics became the study of (1) which frames do we use in
conceptualizing our experience, (2) what semantic roles and scenarios
define each frame, (3) what words are defined by which frames, (4)
what is the grammar associated with the frame elements, and (5) how
are frames related to one another.<br /><br />I was hooked on frame
semantics by 1975, and started working with Chuck on a linguistic
theory that would incorporate frames. We called it Construction
Grammar. The idea was to provide a unified theory of grammar and word
meaning.<br /><br />After working together on it for several years, we
wound up creating two different versions of Construction Grammar for
very different purposes. Chuck had always thought of himself as an
Ordinary Working Linguist (an OWL, as he referred to himself). His
goal was to provide a useful tool for describing languages. As
computer science developed, he moved FrameNet in the direction of
computer-directed frame analysis in various languages, using large
collections of linguistic data (called “corpora”). As a
computational tool for research and teaching, FrameNet stands as a
monument to Chuck’s genius and fortitude, and to the loyalty and
hard work of his students, especially Collin Baker, Miriam Petruck,
and Michael Ellsworth.<br /><br />I went in two other directions, both
inspired by insights of Chuck’s. In 1978, Michel Reddy and I,
independently, found evidence that metaphor was not just in language,
but in thought. We think to a remarkable extent in metaphor, and that
metaphorical concepts, like frames, are largely unconscious. Having
worked with Chuck, I realized that conceptual metaphors were
frame-to-frame mappings, ways of understanding one area of framed
experience in terms of another. A year later, Mark Johnson and I came
to the conclusion that frames, metaphors, and all other aspects of
thought are based on what we called “embodiment,” postulating a
theory of embodied cognition. Having followed Chuck’s instincts on
the role of everyday embodied experience in both case grammar and
frame semantics, this seemed natural to me. Embodied cognition has
become a major research area in the cognitive sciences.<br /><br
/>Chuck, working with his close friend Paul Kay, came up with a
version of Construction Grammar fitting FrameNet goals and methods. I
came up with an embodied version of Construction Grammar that took
into account conceptual metaphor, embodied aspects of frames and
metaphors, and the idea of conceptual prototypes. We published
elaborate initial papers on our versions of construction grammar at
virtually the same time. Mine came out in 1987 as a 100+ page case
study in my book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chuck, working
with Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor, published a lengthy,
beautiful, and overwhelmingly convincing study of the Let Alone
construction (as in He can’t afford a Chevy, let alone a BMW.) It
appeared in Language in 1988 as “Regularity and Idiomaticity in
Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone.”<br /><br />Chuck
also inspired the research I have done over many years in applying
frame semantics to politics. In 1977, Chuck told me about a court case
in Boston in which a doctor who had performed an abortion was put on
trial for murder. In the trial, the defense attorney used the word
fetus and the prosecuting attorney used the word baby. Fetus invoked
the frame of a medical procedure, while baby invoked a killing frame.
The medical frame won out in the trial. But the point was not lost on
me: competing frames are used everywhere in political and social
issues and who wins depends on which frame dominates. To understand
exactly how conceptual framing works through language, the appropriate
field of study is frame semantics.<br /><br />Charles J. Fillmore was
the man who first figured out how framing works. He is world-renowned
in linguistics, but deserves a much wider appreciation as a major
intellectual. I have cited his work over and over, in my writing and
in my talks. But over more than 50 years, he worked modestly as an
OWL, an ordinary working linguist. He was brought up in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and was known for his Minnesotan modesty, gentlemanliness,
and a sly wit befitting Lake Woebegone. When he first came to Berkeley
in 1971, he encountered a culture defined by the then-commonplace
expression, “Let it all hang out.” His response was to wear a
button saying, “Tuck it all back in.”<br /><br />I will always
miss him.<br /><br />George Lakoff<br /><a
href="http://georgelakoff.com/2014/02/18/charles-fillmore-discoverer-of-frame-semantics-dies-in-sf-at-84-he-figured-out-how-framing-works/"
target="_blank">http://georgelakoff.com/2014/02/18/charles-fillmore-discoverer-of-frame-semantics-dies-in-...</a></p><br
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