TYPES OF INFORMATION ABOUT LEXICAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN RUSSIAN FRAMEBANK


2015. № 3 (6), 464-555

1,2 V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of RAS, 2 National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract:

Russian FrameBank is an online resource based on the data from the Russian National Corpus. It includes a dictionary of lexical constructions and a corpus of their uses tagged with a FrameNet-like annotation scheme. On the one hand, FrameBank links the semantics of lexical units to formalized conceptual structures – frames. The users can observe how the slots of a frame are arranged in a text: which participants are overt or covert; what is the order of a predicate and its participants; what other sentence elements (discourse markers, negation etc.) interact with the participants of the target frame, etc. FrameBank also provides information on the morpho-syntactic features of frame elements in a discourse (e. g. typical morpho-syntactic patterns, deviations from the prototype, etc.). Such data on the interface between morpho-syntax and frame semantics may be useful for developing systems of artificial intelligence aimed at retrieving information from texts with due account for morpho- syntactic variation and possible omission of participants. On the other hand, FrameBank is a tool for studying the constructional properties of the Russian lexicon. It makes it possible to find out what morpho-syntactic, semantic or lexical restrictions are imposed by a particular construction on its participants. The illustrations of verbal and nominal government are also available in FrameBank, as well as the list of idioms which are present in the bank of corpus examples. In addition, FrameBank represents lexical constructions as a bridge between different meanings of a predicate (or between the meanings of synonyms), at the same time highlighting constructional oppositions between lexical meanings. The database makes it possible to trace how the lexicon of Russian predicates is overlaid with the network of frames and how the structural relations in lexical semantics (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, etc.) are reflected in the network of lexical constructions.