The general use of semantic types in the FrameNet project is to record information that is not representable in our frame and frame element hierarchies. In this section there is a detailed description of each major category of the semantic type hierarchy, which is broadly split by function. In specific, the functions we currently employ semantic types for are: • Indicating the basic typing of fillers of frame elements, e.g. “Sentient” for the Cognizer FE. These basic types are constrained by the frame hierarchy (see section 6.3.5.1), but not predictable from it since frame elements which are arbitrarily far away according to the frame hierarchy, such as the Experiencer of Perception body and the Perpetrator of the Piracy frame, are often marked as the same semantic type (in this case, Sentient). This kind of semantic type is designed primarily to aid frame parsing and automatic FE recognition. • Useful, functional marking on frames, such as the type “Non-lexical” on frames which are present purely to participate in Inheritance, Subframe, or Using relations with other frames. This kind of property is actually a meta-description, not a fact about the semantics of the frame at all, and thus independent of the hierarchy. In fact, a frame which in English is Non-lexical might well have associated LUs in another language. • Marking important dimensions of semantic variation among the lexical units in a frame that are not related to the kind of semantic combinatorial possibilities that we use for making frame distinctions (see Chapter 2). For instance, in the Judgment frame the difference between LUs such as praise.v and criticize.v in terms of the negative versus positive evaluation of the Evaluee is marked with the semantic types Positive judgment and Negative judgment, respectively. The most interesting function of semantic types for human users is the third one, recording important semantic differences between lexical units that recur within several frames. For example, “Positive judgement” and “Negative judgement” semantic types, indicating the speaker’s attitude toward a situation, can be applied to lexical units across a range of frames. (Note that the term speaker may either refer to a frame element such as Speaker or Cognizer, or to the author of the utterance containing the lexical unit.) We capture the distinction by marking LUs like the aforementioned Judgment verb praise, the Experiencer subj verb like, and the Frugality adjective generous as “Positive judgement” and, by contrast, marking “Negative judgement” on some other words from the same frames, e.g. criticize and hate, and stingy. For more description and further examples, see the following subsections. xsd:string