General definition The term “Frame Element” has two meanings: the relation itself, and the filler of the relation. When we describe the Coreness status of an FE (see Sect. 3.2.1), we are describing the relation; when we describe the Ontological type on an FE (see Sect. 6.2.1) we mean the type of the filler. Fillers are pronouns, proper names, or (more usually) common nouns that evoke entity or event frames. Entity reference, named entities, and anaphora are all outside the scope of the FrameNet project, but when FEs are filled by frame-evoking words, an interpretation engine should iteratively analyze these words in the same way as any other frame-evoking element. xsd:string

Universality of frame elements In Fillmore’s earlier work Fillmore (1968, 1977), a case was made for the universality of certain types of semantic roles, a concept which was further developed and is now enshrined as the theta role system of many syntactic/semantic formalisms. These roles include such labels as Agent, Instrumental, and Objective (roughly corresponding to Agent, Instrument, and Patient in other formulations). However, as the description of the semantics of Lexical Units has progressed, it has become apparent that the theta-role and original case-role account covers only a subset of the full set of roles. We now take it that theta roles should be mapped to FEs in high-level, abstract frames like Transi- tive action, which has FEs like Agent and Patient. The relevance or irrelevance that these labels have for the roles of more specific predicates like break.v (in the Cause to fragment frame) or resemble.v (in the Similarity frame) is explained explicitly by the inheritance or non-inheritance of the Agent and Patient frame elements in the relevant frames. There are inherent problems to reducing our role-set of Frame Elements to the considerably smaller (and inarguably more computationally tractable) set of theta roles often used. One of these is deciding on the initial set of theta roles – a well-known problem in the theta-role literature. The Frame Elements that we define, however, are more immediately verifiable. Presumably, then, any theta-role system proposed to cover all predicates should allow us to specify, in a simple way, which FEs should be mapped to which theta-roles. Of the theta-role systems known to us, none allows any simple mapping to high-level FEs (and thence to the FEs that inherit from them) without covering some FEs multiple times and/or leaving some FEs uncovered, unless there is an unsatisfactory catch-all theta-role. xsd:string

Extrathematic frame elements Extra-thematic FEs have a considerably different interpretation from all other FE types. Normal FEs (barring Coresets or Excludes relations) must always be logically present for the frame to make sense. Extra-thematic FEs, however, independently evoke a different frame from from the one they are listed in. The Extra-thematic FE itself fills one of the FEs of this frame, and the other FEs are filled by various frame elements of the original target word according to heuristics which must be separately specified for each Extra-thematic FE. For example, in 44, evoking the Ride vehicles frame, the Cotheme FE evokes an additional instance of Motion whose Theme FE is filled by the Cotheme, and whose Path and other FEs are co-identified with the instance of Ride vehicles. Thus both “I” and “her” are described as moving to school in this example. (44) I rode to school [with her Cotheme] all the time. (Semantically) non-Extrathematic FEs are classes that are arguments of the Frame classes. xsd:string