Frame Semantics as a framework for describing polysemy and syntactic structures of English and German motion verbs in contrastive computational lexicography

This paper addresses the question of how to account for verbal polysemy from a contrastive point of view. By examining the syntactic and semantic distribution of arguments of a selected number of English and German motion verbs, I intend to demonstrate the usefulness of Fillmore’s (1982) Frame Semantics for describing verbal argument realization patterns across languages. In this connection it will be shown that frame-semantic descriptions offer a unified way of relating the full range of lexical units that instantiate the same semantic concept. In addition to these theoretical considerations, practical applications of the frame-semantic approach to lexical organization are discussed.