In this talk, I will demonstrate how Frame Semantics can be applied to studying the rhetorical structure of discourse (Subirats, Ellsworth, and Taboada, in preparation). In particular, I will show how a “rhetorical relation” between sentences, such as reason or evidence, can be described as a coreference relation between the sentence that instantiates the rhetorical relation and an indefinite null instantiation (INI) of a non-core frame element evoked by a lexical unit (LU) in the earlier sentence. In other words, a rhetorical relationship can be specified by identifying the anaphoric relationship between a sentence and an INI evoked by an LU in another sentence. This talk will also cover the relationship between semantic frames and metaphor. Analyzing a conceptual metaphor as a mapping between two frames, instead of a mapping between two “domains”, allows us to explain more precisely how the new metaphorical meaning emerges. I will show how defining implicational relationships between the frames in a given source domain allows us to predict whether those frames can participate in particular metaphorical mapping relations (Subirats and Ellsworth, in preparation; Subirats, in press).

References Subirats, Carlos. (In press). Frames, constructions, and metaphors in Spanish FrameNet. In I. Verdaguer, N. J. Laso, and D. Salazar, eds. Biomedical English: A corpus-based approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.