The semantics of syntactic frames

Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research in linguistics, while more precise about frame meanings, has depended largely upon intuition. The research reported in this paper attempts to bridge this gap by using experimental methods to ask speakers directly for judgements about what frames mean. In two experiments, subjects were presented with six frames. The content words of each frame were converted to nonsense (e.g., The rom gorped the blickit to the dax and The grack mecked the zarg). Subjects were asked to rate the likelihood that various semantic properties were true of the nonsense verb. Results support the notion that syntactic frames carry fairly specific meanings, even in the absence of a known verb.