Semantic fields and frames: Historical explorations of the interface between language, action, and cognition

ELSEVIER

Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 125-150 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma

Semantic fields and frames: Historical explorations of the interface between language, action, and cognition Brigitte Nerlich*, David D. Clarke School of Psychology, UniversiO, of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Received 3 March 1998; revised version 2 February 1999

Abstract The concept of 'semantic field', like the concept of 'semantic frame', opened up new domains of semantic research, first in Germany in the 1930s and then in the United States in the 1970s. Both concepts brought about 'revolutions' in semantics, and provided semanticists with new tools for the study of semantic change and semantic structure. Although there have been several historical accounts of the development of field semantics, there exists no detailed study linking and comparing the development of field and frame semantics. In this article we shall reconstruct the contexts in which the concepts of 'field' and 'frame' appeared for the first time and highlight the similarities as well as the differences between the semantic theories built on them. One of the main differences between the older and the modem traditions is that the latter no longer study how lexical fields carve up a relatively amorphous conceptual mass, as most older traditions had done, but how lexical fields are conceptually and pragmatically 'framed' by or grounded in our bodily, social and cultural experiences and practices. In doing so they establish forgotten links with certain communicational and functional conceptions of semantic fields developed in the past. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Semantics; Cognitive linguistics; Pragmatics and cognition; History of linguistics; Field; Frame

The authors are very grateful to the anonymous referees for their hard work and expert advice. * Corresponding author. Phone: +44 115 951 5361/8341; Fax: +44 115 851 5324; E-mail: [email protected] 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00042-9

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1. Introduction In recent years we have seen a number of publications dealing with the affinities between pre-structuralist historical semantics and post-structuralist cognitive semantics (Geeraerts, 1988; Nerlich, 1992, 1993), between pre-Austinian and post-Austinian pragmatics (Nerlich and Clarke, 1996, 1997), and between old theories of field semantics and new theories of frame semantics (Post, 1988; Dtirschner, 1996). In 1988 Post wrote that traditional field semantics and modem frame semantics share certain essential features. Both study groups of words that belong together under the same conceptual heading, and both hold that conceptual fields and frames reflect the world as experienced by the users of a language (Post, 1988; Geeraerts et al., 1994). Post also points out that the more we look at the weaker versions of field semantics, proposed after the publication of Jost Trier's strong version in his 1931 treatise Der Deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, the more shared features we can find between the old and the new. In this article we want to demonstrate that these shared features also increase the further we go back in time to works published prior to Trier's. In the space of one article it is almost impossible to do justice to the world-wide development of field and frame semantics. We shall therefore try to achieve a balance between presenting an overview of what is already fairly well known about the historical connections between the older and newer versions of field (and frame) semantics and pointing out some more hidden connections and perhaps unjustly forgotten ones. It is not possible to cover all strands of field and frame semantics, as the following overview will demonstrate. For the older types of field semantics two influences were important: Wilhelm von Humboldt's interest in how language structures thought, and Ferdinand de Sanssure's interest in the systematic structure of language. Modem types of field and frame semantics were influenced by advances in cognitive anthropology, cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence, a framework in which linguists and cognitivists tried to uncover how semantic fields and frames interrelate with conceptual structures, knowledge representation, memory, and text understanding by humans and computers. Both, the older and newer approach to 'semantic fields' inherited certain insights from Humboldt and from Gestalt psychology. One can distinguish between three versions of the older types of field semantics: those developed after Humboldt and before Saussure (between 1830 and 1916), those developed after Saussure, but under the influence of Humboldt (between 1916 and 1950), and those developed under the influence of full-blown structuralism (from 1960s onwards). One can call these older versions (1) postHumboldtian field semantics, (2) post-Saussurean and neo-Humboldtian field semantics, and (3) neo-Saussurean and structuralist field semantics. We shall concentrate here on certain aspects of German field semantics as developed in the post-Humboldtian and neo-Humboldtian tradition, 1 leaving aside the sometimes pari See Ohman (1953), Spence (1961), Ullmann (1962), Coseriu (1967b); Hoberg (1970), Van der Lee and Reichmann (1973), Vassilyev (1974), Coseriu and Geckeler (198l), Gordon (1982), Schmitter (1987), Grandy (1987), Herbermann (1995), Geeraerts (1995).

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allel, sometimes overlapping developments of various other national traditions, such as the Russian one (from A.A. Potebnja and M.M. Pokrovskij onwards, see Vassilyev, 1974), the Scandinavian one (from Tegn6r to Noreen, Grundtvig, Ohman and beyond), 2 the English one, from Firth to Haas and beyond (Cruse, 1986: 21, note 16), the French one (from the eighteenth-century synonymologists up to Bally, Mator6, Ducha6ek, and beyond; Guiraud, 1966; Geckeler, 1973), the Spanish one (e.g., Trujillo, 1970), and so on. We also have to stop short of discussing the wellknown development of structuralist field and feature semantics, be it in Germany (e.g., Coseriu, Geckeler), France (e.g., Pottier, Greimas), England (e.g., Lyons, Leech, Cruse) or the United States (e.g., Nida, Katz and Fodor) (for an overview see Lyons, 1995; Goddard, 1998). We can only hint at a whole variety of more modem schools of lexical field semantics (in a broad sense), which one can situate in Montr6al (Montr6al, 1984ff), Moscow (Apresjan, 1966, 1992, and numerous books published in Russian and not yet translated into English), and Berlin (the work done by Eikmeyer and Rieser for example, 1981); or the schools of field semantics developed around teachers such as Charles Fillmore, Adrienne Lehrer (1974; Lehrer and Kittay, 1992), and Anna Wierzbicka, trying to establish a 'natural semantic metalanguage', the 'NSM school', and linked to the work done around Apresjan (Wierzbicka, 1996: ch. 5; see Peeters, 1991, 1993). One can, however broadly, distinguish between various frame conceptions (which overlap in the latter part of this century with certain versions of field semantics): (1) pre-AI, anthropological frame 'semantics' (1950s onwards); (2) the introduction of new concepts in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, such as Marvin Minsky's concept of 'frame' (1975), Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's concept of 'script' (1977), and David Rumelhart's concept of 'schema' (1975); (3) post-Al frame semantics as advocated first and foremost by Fillmore, which links back to the post-Saussurean and neo-Humboldtian type of field semantics (for more details on these trends, see section 4.). Other related types of post-AI field and frame semantics were developed around Lehrer in the United States, by J~inos S. Pet6fi (1976), Dieter Metzing (1980), Leonard Lipka (1990), Hans-Jtirgen Eikmeyer and Hannes Rieser (1981), Peter Rolf Lutzeier (1993), Karl-Peter Konerding (1993), Hans-Jtirgen 2 In 1874 the Swedish scholar Esaias Tegn6r wrote his treatise SprCtk och nationalitet on Humboldtian lines. "He compared the content of consciousness with a field which is divided into parts by means of the vocabulary of a language; each language divides this field in its own way, which explains why the corresponding partial fields of two languages are seldom congruent" (Ohman, 1953: 130; Malmberg, 1977). In 1925 Vilhelm Grundtvig wrote a book on concepts and language, in which he explores the topics of historical synonymics, comparative synonymics, conceptual development, the struggle between synonyms and between meanings, conceptual groups, the embeddedness of a word in its conceptual context, professional terminologies, etc. The general linguist Adolf Noreen also took a psycholinguistic interest in semantic fields. Scandinavian field semantics will be studied in a separate article. We would only like to quote here from a review by Bengt Loman of Suzanne Ohman's thesis (Ohmann, 1951), in which he provides the following Ahnenreihe of linguists and philosophers interested in the study of semantic fields (as one can see, the history of this study is still a wide field, see also note 4); "Michaelis, Fichte, Tegn6r, Whitney, Gabelentz, Sandfeld Jensen, Cassirer, Weisgerber" (Loman, 1951: 124). We would like to thank Ann-Catrine Edlund for sending us this article.

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Schmid (1993) and others in Germany, and by Franqois Rastier (1996) and others in France. Some of these researchers use concepts like frame, domain, mental model, mental spaces and so on which had been introduced into cognitive linguistics by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Philip Johnson-Laird (1983), Lakoff (1987), Johnson (1987), Ronald Langacker (1987), and Gilles Fauconnier (1985). More recently, a cognitive and pragmatic type of field semantics has been advocated by Dirk Geeraerts and his colleagues, which links back to neo-Saussurean and structuralist field semantics, but also to post-Humboldtian field semantics (Geeraerts et al., 1994; Geeraerts, 1995; see also Verschueren, 1985: ch. 2.3, 2.4; Grandy, 1992). Peter Koch and Andreas Blank in Germany use the notion of frame to criticize both prototype semantics and structuralist semantics in an attempt to introduce a new version of cognitive semantics to the study of the Romance languages (Koch, in press; Blank, in press). The new insights into the structure of mental and lexical prototypes and family resemblances, as well as discoveries about the functioning of metaphor, as mapping elements from a source domain onto a target domain (Lakoff, 1987), are central to these more recent developments (on metaphor and fields, see Lehrer and Kittay, t981; Kittay, 1987). Metaphor had been a problem to field theories, structural ones in particular, as it disturbed both the possibility to dissect linguistic knowledge into neat fields and/or features, and the belief that linguistic knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge could be tidily distinguished. In the following we shall assemble some of the elements for a field semantics which emerged before Trier and which has more similarities with the cognitive and pragmatic type of field and frame semantics developed in recent years than with the structuralist types of field semantics that came after Trier.

2. Elements for a systemic and functional theory of semantic fields The roots of field semantics reach back into the practical work done by French, German and English synonymologists, onomasiologists, and lexicographers, as well as by those interested in founding dictionaries not on an alphabetical lists of words, but on the study of groups or families of words that belong together under the same conceptual heading. Such a dictionary was, for example, advocated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz at the end of the eighteenth century (Ohman, 1953:130) and found its true incarnation in Roget's thesaurus, first published in 1852. This kind of enterprise was revived at the beginning of the twentieth century, when scholars engaged in collecting conceptually ordered word lists (Titkin, 1910; Hallig and Wartburg, 1952, see below). Traditional field semantics took its main theoretical inspirations from post-Humboldtian and neo-Humboldtian studies of the interrelation between language and thought, based on Humboldt's conception of the inner form of language, developed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Saussure's conception of language as a system of signs proposed at the beginning of the twentieth. According to Humboldt, the inner form manifests itself in the different vocabularies adopted by differ-

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ent peoples to structure cultural or referential phenomena. Every language mediates in a particular way between reality and thought and represents a particular way of seeing and thinking about the world. Humboldt's semantics was a holistic one. He wanted to see how languages capture reality and culture as wholes. By contrast, the semantics that developed between Humboldt and Saussure was largely an atomistic one. Semanticists tried to find the meanings of single words and traced the changes of these meanings over time, focusing on the classification of the transitions between their meanings according to different sets of criteria (Nerlich, 1992). The semantics that developed after Saussure returned to Humboldt's more holistic conception, and semanticists began again to study whole lexical fields. At the same time the focus shifted from studying meaning and changes in meaning, as changes in the 'ideas' associated with words over time, towards studying the relations between words from which meaning was seen as emerging. In his Cours de linguistique ggn~rale (1916) Saussure had shown that the meaning (or value) of a word is not the idea we attach with a sound, neither is the word just a label for an object. The meaning of a word emerges from the differences and oppositions between neighboring terms in a linguistic system. This new structural and holistic view of meaning chimed in well with developments in Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of symbolic forms as developed by Ernst Cassirer (1923). The notion of field was also in the air at that time in physics, where it was used in the study of magnetic fields, gravitational fields, electric fields, and particle fields (Herbermann, 1995), giving rise to metaphors such as the emotional 'charge' of a field in Sperber's work (1923) or of Kraftfeld in Weisgerber's (1973 [1939]: 218). Edmund Husserl's (1900-1901) phenomenological analysis and its antipsychologism also reinforced the structuralist point of view that semantic fields should be studied in themselves and for themselves and not with reference to psychological concepts or real world objects. We shall now look at some constituents for a systemic and functional field semantics which one can extract from work written before this 'structural' revolution took place.

2.1. Opposites and overlapping circles Influenced by the popular study of synonyms, but also by the study of stylistics, which had began to flourish alongside historical semantics, a number of scholars started to provide novel theories of meaning and their interrelations by the mid-nineteenth century (Coseriu, 1967b). As early as 1856 the language teacher Karl Friedrich von Nagelsbach had, for example, studied Latin word 'families' as 'chains of representations', 'word chains', 'paradigmata', or 'chains of associations' in a book on Latin stylistics (Nagelsbach, 1856: 22-25). Karl Abel, an Egyptologist and general linguist, better known than N~igelsbach, also worked on the fringe of official historical linguistics. He became most famous for his thesis that primitive words always denote their opposites (Abel, 1884). Interested in word pairs and word groups, he came to study the meaning of words from a 'structural' point of view. He grouped words together into 'semantic fields' and studied the relations between the words in these groups (Abel, 1882, 1885). Contin-

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uing the Humboldtian tradition, Abel saw languages as the expression of national modes of thought, and examined, among others, the conception of love in some ancient and modern languages, the various English verbs of command and the distribution of synonyms used for the concepts of slavery, fleeing and so on. Abel did not regard these groups as closed entities, and he did not (as Trier would do later) explore the meanings of the words inside these semantic groupings by using the metaphor of a 'mosaic', or jigsaw puzzle (Trier, 1973 [1968]: 195). Instead, he saw their meanings as overlapping and he even illustrated his studies of the various word groups with overlapping circles. Similar illustrations can be found as early as 1858 in Pierre Benjamin Lafaye's dictionary of synonyms (HaSler, 1991: 144-145) and as late as 1952 in Arne Rudskoger's study of 'notion fields' or 'sense fields' (Rudskoger, 1952). They all wanted to study the lexicon as a system of semantic relations by focusing on the distribution of synonyms over semantic fields. The overlapping nature of meaning relations and the fuzziness of meaning were also stressed by scholars such as Gustav Gerber (1884), Philipp Wegener (who used an early concept of frame he called 'schema', Wegener, 1991 [1885]: 138f.; see Nerlich, 1990), and Karl Otto Erdmann (1910). They, in turn, influenced the pragmatically grounded theories of metaphorical blending as put forward by Alan Henderson Gardiner, Gustav Stahlin and Karl Btihler (who also developed a distinctive notion of symbolic and deictic fields, Biihler, 1990 [1934]: 79ff., 149ff., see Nerlich, in prep.). Trier acknowledged Abel's work in 1934 (together with that of Osthoff, Meyer, Grundtvig and others; Trier, 1973 [1934]: 113, note 5), and the very first sentence of his famous 1931 treatise echoes Abel's book on semantic opposites: "No spoken word is as isolated in the consciousness of the speaker and the hearer as one might conclude from its phonetic isolation. Every spoken word calls forth its opppsite sense (Gegensinn)" (Trier, 1973 [1931]: 40). 3 To discover the meaning of a word we have to compare and contrast it with contemporaneous others, not trace it back to its distant ancestors. 2.2. From synonyms to semantic systems

During most of the nineteenth century the concept of 'system' was regarded with suspicion by linguists, as it smacked of the type of philosophizing linguistics that the more data oriented historical linguists wanted to overthrow. However, by the turn of the century the concepts of 'system' and then 'structure' slowly infiltrated linguistics, especially semasiology and the teaching of languages through the 'systematic' learning of lexical fields or families of words (Liebich, 1899, and many others). An early use of the term 'system' in a more theoretically oriented essay can be found in Richard Moritz Meyer's (1910a) seminal article entitled 'systems of meaning' (Kronasser, 1952: §§97-98; Vassilyev, 1974: 79). It was Meyer's goal to establish certain systems of meanings, and to derive from their organization the meaning of their constituents (Meyer, 1910a: 356). 3 All translationsare BrigitteNerlich's unlessotherwisestated.

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Meyer does not quote Abel as his model but lists several other precursors of field semantics.4 He stresses that the existence of certain semantic systems was fairly well known, as testified by the studies of names for trees or animals and, most importantly, of the system of numbers. However, he points out that it is less well known that this systematic approach can also be applied to the understanding of the semantic value of any other word. His axiom is that no word exists in isolation. Analyzing in some detail the terminology of military ranks (see also Meyer, 1910b), Meyer writes: "As it is an artificial one, the military terminology provides us with a picture of a semantic system which is much clearer than the one that can be found in natural systems. One has to stress however, that most semantic systems are to a certain degree artificial ones." (Meyer, 1910a: 358)

Eighty years on, frame semanticists are again studying artificial nomenclatures, as these best exhibit the features that mark the relationship between lexical fields and conceptual frames, and are therefore of heuristic value for field and frame semantics. According to Meyer, the systematicity of the semantic system itself, be it military terminology or the terminology of certain professions, is based in the final analysis on the use (Verwendung) that individuals make of that system. Semasiology therefore has to find for every word the system(s) to which it belongs, as well as the system-building, differentiating factor (Meyer, 1910a: 359). Systems of meaning derive their structure from our communicative needs and demands and these needs provide the perspective according to which words are semantically grouped together. Diachronically this means that the structure of a semantic system persists as long as there is a communicative need for it to exist and that it changes when the communicative need that holds it together changes. In the course of time, semantic systems are gradually modified under the pressure of changing needs of communication. If one term in the field changes its meaning or drops out, this provokes shifts and replacements which entail a repair of the overall semantic pattern. Here the rebuilding of the system is the result of internal pressure from the system itself (Systemzwang) (Meyer, 1910a: 365). Meyer's approach to the study of semantic fields can therefore be called a structural-functional approach.

2.3. System, use, and emotions Meyer's communicative and systemic approach to semantic change had some echoes in Hans Sperber's (1923) theory of meaning, which is based on Jungian and Freudian psychology. According to Sperber, semantic change is driven by emotions. Emotions are for Sperber what Meyer had called the 'system-forming factors' in semantics. Sperber therefore criticizes historical semanticists for wishing to find semantic laws that would be equivalent to 'sound-laws' and work in the same deter4 He mentions the work of Fritz Bechtel devoted to the designations of sensual perceptions, published in 1879, the attempt by the mythologist and general linguist Friedrich Max Miiller to classify 121 primitive concepts into certain semantic spheres (M~iller, 1891 [1901]), and two treatises by the two most famous neogrammarians: Brugmann (1894) and Osthoff (1901).

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ministic way. He argues that all one can hope to discover are certain semantic regularities (Gesetzmiifiigkeiten). One such regularity is that if at a certain time a given complex of representations (a team he had borrowed from Jung) is so heavily charged with emotions that it drives one word beyond its original meaning and forces it to adopt a new meaning, we can expect that this same complex of representations will also force other expressions that belong to it to transgress their sphere of use and thus to develop new meanings (Sperber, 1923: 67). Semantic change can therefore only be studied as a change in an emotionally 'charged' field of words. A current example would be the cloning of a sheep called Dolly, which has been the source of various metaphors to do with propagation, reproduction and copying. Though critical of Sperber's psychological foundations, Trier conceded that Sperber "has really discovered some linguistically essential things here. Namely [...] that it is always whole groups, groups of words held together by meaning, which spread over other ontological domains when they are extended metaphorically" (Trier, 1973 [1934]: 137-138).

2.4. From semantic systems to encyclopedic worm knowledge At the same time as Meyer was calling for a systematic and functional study of semantic fields, Rudolf Meringer published a paper entitled 'Wrrter und Sachen' ('Words and things', Meringer, 1909). In this programmatic article he argued that world knowledge or knowledge about objects precedes linguistic knowledge, and that words change their meanings because the objects change over time. The meanings of words and the changes in meaning reflect cultural facts and are determined by them (Meringer, 1909: 593; Htillen, 1990: 141). Onomasiologists of the Wrrter und Sachen approach were interested in Bezeichnung (reference or designation) and not only Bedeutung (sense or meaning) and their history (Bezeichnungsgeschichte, not only Bedeutungsgeschichte). They wanted to see how different linguistic communities designate various objects over time or in geographical space. Others, such as Walther von Wartburg, argued that concepts preceded words. Inspired by the linguistic atlases or maps which had proliferated with the success of the Wrrter und Sachen movement, he showed in the 1920s how the technique of 'mapping' "depended on conceptual slots which were filled with lexemes, differentiated according to their regional usage" (H~illen, 1990: 142). This insight resulted in the publication of Rudolf Hallig and Wartburg's Begriffssystem als Grundlage fiir die Lexikographie in 1952 (Hallig and Wartburg, 1952), which coincided with a section of the 7th International Congress of Linguists, held in London in 1952, which dealt with "systems of linguistic expression, conceptual dictionaries, and dictionaries of usage" (Htillen, 1990: 132). It was thought that such dictionaries or systems of concepts would provide a map of the spiritual world of a linguistic community at a given point in time. A series of such dictionaries would in turn constitute a diachronic map of changing conceptual spaces and cultural frameworks. Comparisons between such synchronic and diachronic maps would be the cornerstone for a new type of cultural and linguistic history or anthropology.

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The view that our knowledge of objects, concepts, and cultural practices structures meaning was pushed into the background by some post-Saussurean field theorists, and most severely rejected by some neo-Saussurean structuralist field theorists, only to be rediscovered when structuralism began to wane.

3. Elements for a structural theory of semantic fields

Six years after Meyer's groundbreaking article, Saussure's Cours appeared (1916). In his lectures on general linguistics (held at about the time when Meyer was writing), Saussure had not set himself the task of reforming semasiology, but of providing linguistics in general with sound methodological foundations. It is therefore not astonishing to find that he only provides a brief example of how to study what later became known as associative fields or semantic fields. What is more important, however, is his theory that the value of linguistic signs (lexemes, morphemes, phonemes and so on) is based on oppositions and differences, and that there are two axes along which these oppositions and differences work so as to structure a language as a whole: the associative or paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis (Saussure, 1916: ch. 5). Saussure's focus on language-internal relations strongly influenced Trier and Weisgerber's approach to semantic fields, as well as structural field semantics developed in the 1960s, suppressing (especially on the Continent) the semasiological, communicational and functional insights voiced by Meyer. Trier and his colleagues studied semantic fields predominantly as (onomasiological) 'paradigms'. The study of semantic fields has remained to a large extent an onomasiological and structural enterprise, as linguists explain the ways in which a field of words referring (to take Trier's example) to intellectual properties is structured internally, or how a field of words referring to skirts, for example, provides a lexical map of the concept or category of 'skirt' (Geeraerts et al., 1994:118). However, in modern research, this onomasiological and structural approach is supplemented by a pragmatic and functional one reaching back to the new semasiology as advocated by Meyer. The 1920s were a time of rapid scientific expansion and, indeed, revolution. The works of Saussure, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud had laid new foundations for the social sciences. Einstein's general theory of relativity, the first twentieth-century field theory in physics, profoundly changed our view of the universe as a whole. And the work of the Gestalt psychologists, to whose thinking the concept of 'field' was central, innovated thinking in psychology. In almost all fields of human knowledge, the nineteenth-century urge to look for origins, antecedents, and chains of associations was replaced by a search for structural relations. This meant that between 1910 and 1920 the use of the term 'field' in linguistics increased rapidly. 3.1. Semantic fields between use and structure

In 1924 Gunther Ipsen used the term 'Bedeutungsfeld' en passant and made a brief appeal for the study of semantic fields (Ipsen, 1924). Similar to Meyer before

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him, Ipsen used the term semantic field, which stands in contrast to Trier's later use of the term Wortfeld (vocabulary or lexical field) coupled to Begriffsfeld (conceptual field). We shall see that Trier regards this contrast in terminology as a contrast in theory. For Ipsen a Bedeutungsfeld was a group of words which together form a unit of meaning as, for instance, the Indo-European vocabulary for 'sheep' and 'sheep raising' (Ipsen, 1924: 225). These words are not related by genealogical association, but lie side by side like the pieces in a mosaic and divide what one could call a 'form of life', a praxis or a domain of knowledge, into lexical parts (Ohmann, 1953: 125). Ipsen was the first to use the metaphor of the mosaic structure of the semantic field and he also stressed the holistic character of the field, two theorems taken up by Trier. Furthermore, he claimed that all words are components of such fields, and that the lexicon as a whole can therefore be regarded as organized by such fields. Hence, the meaning of words should not be derived from their etymological ancestry, but from the status, the use, of a word in a field at a given moment in time (Herbermann, 1995: 266). This 'softer' form of semantic field theory was soon superseded by the 'harder' forms postulated by Trier and Weisgerber. Praxis, use, and domain knowledge were backgrounded and the intralinguistic relations between words were foregrounded. However, unlike in full-blown structuralist linguistics, the link between conceptualcultural knowledge and linguistic knowledge was not yet completely severed. 3.2. A relational conception of semantic fields In 1927 Leo Weisgerber published a seminal article entitled 'Die Bedeutungslehre: Ein Irrweg der Sprachwissenschaft?' ('Semasiology: A wrong turn in linguistics?', Weisgerber, 1927). This article was a reaction against traditional German semasiology and onomasiology, the former studying the various meanings that one word form received over time along a chain of associations (Bedeutungswandel), the latter studying the various names that one object or concept received over time or in geographical space (Bezeichnungsgeschichte) (Schmitter, 1987). Instead, Weisgerber wanted to see meaning studied structurally or, as he called it, relationally, and solely on the linguistic level, not with respect to the psychology of the speakers and not with regard to objects in the world. This view of meaning was based on (or has at least many similarities with) Saussure's conception of signs as values. Weisgerber had already discussed this view of meaning in his inaugural lecture of 1925, in which he claimed that "the individual elements of our vocabulary define and support each other" and that they "only obtain their conceptual value through this mutual definition" (Weisgerber, 1964 [1925]: 24). He also used the (Saussurean) concepts of 'system', 'semantic system', 'group of concepts', and 'system of concepts' - ideas which Trier then applied in his Habilitation thesis of 1928 and published in 1931 under the title Der Deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. 3.3. The axiomatization of semantic field theory As we have seen, Trier was not the first to study semantic fields. What distinguishes Trier's work from that of his predecessors is the fact that he based his field

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semantics on a number of explicit theorems and definitions and tried to establish a unified theory. The defining features of Trier's early concept of the lexical field (Wortfeld), which carves up or maps directly onto a conceptual field (Begriffsfeld), can be represented by two conceptual pairs: Ganzheit/Geschlossenheit and Gliederung/Gefiige (Herbermann, 1995). The first feature refers to the external boundaries of the field, the second to the internal structure of the field (Geeraerts et al., 1994: 118). The lexical field is a structured totality in which the content of a word is embedded. It is a relatively closed structure. As Trier says himself, the conceptual cognates (Begriffsverwandten) of a word "form between themselves [...] a structured totality, a configuration, which one could call a word field or a linguistic sign field" (Trier, 1973 [1931]: 40). A word can only signify as part of this totality. So, the first defining feature of the concept of lexical field is its totality (Ganzheit) coupled with that of closure (Geschlossenheit). A lexical field is a closed totality or whole in which words and concepts define each other mutually. The second defining feature is structure (Gliederung), coupled with that of configuration (Gefiige), as the content of the words that make up a field delimit and define each other like the patches on a quilt. The meaning of each word and the concept that each word denotes are defined by the opposition in which each stands with its semantic and conceptual neighbors (1973 [1931 ]: 42). Closely associated with the feature of configuration is the feature of the exactness of this mutual definition of meaning and concepts (Liickenlosigkeit). Unlike some of his predecessors who had stressed the fuzziness of conceptual and lexical boundaries, Trier claimed that the boundaries between conceptual fields and between the concepts which make them up are sharply defined, categorical boundaries, and that the semantic content of the words so defined covers the semantic field without any gaps. The meanings and concepts are carved up without leftovers or overlaps. This latter feature of the lexical field is illustrated through the metaphor of the mosaic structure of the field (1973 [1931]: 40). In his early writings, Trier often used the metaphor of the coat or blanket of signs (Zeichenmantel, Zeichendecke), and later the metaphor of the net (Netzwerk, Trier, 1973 [1968]: 190) that covers a certain Begriffsblock, Begriffskomplex, Begriffsbezirk or Sinnbezirk, that is, a certain conceptual block or field. This conceptual complex is in itself unstructured (Trier, 1973 [1931]: 45), a view which is nowadays vehemently rejected by cognitive field and frame semanticists. In covering this conceptual field in a certain way with a lexical coat or net, meaning is generated by the differences between the signs making up the coat of signs, and at one and the same time the concepts are carved up. Language does not mirror concepts, it creates them. This means that "meaning exists only in the field" (1973 [ 1931 ]: 45). Trier illustrates this carving up with the famous example of the German system of school marks. In this case the conceptual complex 'Leistungsbewertung' (evaluation of school work) is neatly carved up into five parts: sehr gut, gut, geniigend, mangelhaft, ungeniigend (very good, good, sufficient, poor, insufficient). As Weisgerber pointed out later on, it can also be carved up into 4 or 6 parts (Weisgerber, 1962: 99). In each case, the meaning of a term depends on the number and position of the

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words adjacent to it in the totality of the field (Trier, 1973 [1931]: 47). Writing a 'good' essay on a four-mark scale means something quite different from writing a 'good' essay on a six-mark scale. The term good changes in value with the scale used. In a similar way we have to know what Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are, that they are days of the week, and that a week has seven days, so as to be able to understand what the word Saturday means. In 1968 Trier uses another picture, in which the rather static effect of carving up a complex of concepts on the synchronic level, is now viewed in its dynamic diachronic flow. The semantic field is compared to the 'field' of horses in a horse race, a field which is continually shifting and changing as the positions and relations between the horses change. This picture, Trier acknowledges, contrasts to some extent with the picture of the static mosaic with each piece fitting into the contours of the others (Trier, 1973 [1968]: 193, 195). The synchronic picture of the sign coat or patchwork of signs covering a complex of concepts is therefore somewhat mitigated and replaced by the picture of stars whose rays interlock like cogwheels. However, Trier still stresses the mutual semantic interdependence of all the members of a semantic field at any point in time. Leaving aside the various metaphors, the advantages of Trier's new conception of meaning as emerging from the mutual delimitation of signs in semantic space are clear: it breaks with the etymological tradition. A word's meaning is not defined by what it once meant in the past, but by what distinguishes it from its neighbors in a lexical field here and now. This means for diachronic semantics that we can no longer study the changes of an isolated word over time, but that we have to examine the changes in a field which bring about changes in meaning. The history of a field is the history of its dissection, and semantic change is change in the lexical field. And yet, however hard Trier tried to stick to his axioms of the closure and internal structure of semantic fields, he always acknowledged that the meaning of a word is not only a function of its relation to other members in a field, but is also grounded in a conceptual field. Semantic fields reflect cultural and conceptual fields, they reflect, as later frame semanticists would say, the changing experiences of the language users. Trier illustrates this relational and conceptual grounding of word meaning with the well-known analysis of the semantic change undergone by the German words for knowledge in the 13th and 14th century (for a good summary see now Fritz, 1998: 5.1.8). "At one period wFsheit, kunst and list embodied two fundamental principles of medieval civilization, i.e., feudalism and universality. A hundred years later, due to social changes and a breakdown in the medieval system, science, philosophy and theology came to be distinguished. As a result, the structure of the entire conceptual field of knowledge altered, too, and it came to be exhaustively and differently articulated by kunst, wizzen and wfsheit." (Post, 1988: 38). Trier's study of terms for intellectual properties can be regarded as supplementing the then thriving fields of onomasiology and 'words and things' by venturing out into the realm of terms for mental phenomena (Trier, 1973 [1932]: 98). Where others studied the designations for a scythe, Trier studied the designations for intellectual powers in various periods of the German language. He points out quite rightly:

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"There is no history (Bezeichnungsgeschichte) of the words for intelligence, as there is a history of the names for a scythe" (1973 [1932]: 98). We can only study the designations for, say, wisdom, as part of the semantic field covering the conceptual and culturally determined domain of intellectual terms. Trier's field semantics is therefore also, as he says, a contribution to historical anthropology. It adds to our understanding of 'man' by analyzing the shifts and changes in the terminology relating to 'man's' most defining feature: mind and cognition. 3.4. The disintegration of Trier's semantic field theory Trier's conception of the lexical field prompted numerous empirical works on similar lines (Ohman, 1953: 126, note 16; Vassilyev, 1974), but his theorems of closure, totality, and mosaic structure did not remain unchallenged. Ipsen was one of the first to point out that semantic fields are rarely closed entities, thereby attacking the theorem of closure. The theorem of the totality of the field was challenged by Walter Porzig (1934) and Andr6 Jolles (1934), and so was the view that there are no gaps (see Peeters, 1996). It became clear (again) that many semantic fields overlap and that the boundaries between them are anything but sharp. These criticisms of Trier's conception of a lexical field are repeated by Geeraerts et al. in 1994 from the perspective of modern cognitive linguistics. From this point of view, both the theorem of the closure of one field against another and the theorem of the absence of gaps between members of a field had to be rejected. Lexical fields were shown to be non-discrete in both respects (Geeraerts et al., 1994:118-123), something that Trier himself seemed to acknowledge in 1934, when he conceded that "the internal boundaries of fields, far from being mathematically clear demarcation lines, in reality rather constitute overlapping areas and fluctuating transitional zones" (Trier, 1973 [1934]: 174, transl. 1973 [1934]: 123). However, Trier still maintained in 1934 that semantic fields have no gaps. He also reiterated his view that a field can only be analysed when viewed as embedded in the structured totality of a language as a whole, what Spence aptly called language as a "super-Gestalt", where "concept fields shape the raw material of experience and divide it up without overlapping like the pieces in a completed jig-saw puzzle" (Spence, 1961: 90). On the next level down, the "individual field, in its turn, is a mosaic of related words or concepts, the individual word getting its meaning only through distinguishing itself from its neighbours, and the field again being divided up completely and without overlapping" (1961: 90). In principle, the analyst should adopt this top-down approach to the study of lexical fields, starting with the totality of the language as a super-Gestalt and working down to the more and more specific lexical fields, and finally the individual words. Trier rejected the bottom-up approach adopted by many of his competitors, who began building up semantic fields from the analysis of single words or pairs of words, or syntagmatic relations between words, what Coseriu called 'lexical solidarities' (1967a). The top-down approach deals with what Trier calls lexical fields, whereas the bottom-up approach 0nly deals with semantic fields. However, Trier leaves the implementation of this top-down method rather vague

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(Trier, 1973 [1934]: 177). In modern field semantics the top-down approach seems to be favored by some cognitive semanticists analysing quasi-universal conceptual and semantic structures, whereas the bottom-up approach is more favored by those working inside the Fillmore school of frame semantics. An intermediate position is taken by Lawrence Barsalou who, in 1992, proposed an hierarchical model of local frames as part of more complex and more global frames (Barsalou, 1992). By the end of the 1930s Trier's contribution to the debate faded away, and Weisgerber's neo-Humboldtian conception of the lexical field, linked to his views that the mother tongue shapes every nation's vision of the world (Weltbild), came to the fore. Weisgerber extended field semantics beyond the lexical realm, to include the study of case systems, of tense systems and 'conceptual relations' inside grammatical systems and systems of word formation. He even wrote about 'syntactic fields', such as the 'field of commands' (Befehlssdtze), where he explored all possible syntactic patterns which can be used in the linguistic realization of an order (Schmitter, 1987: 184). Hans Schwarz later amalgamated the field concept with that of valency in a Trier-Festschrift (Schwarz, 1975) (for a discussion of valency theory and frames, see Storrer, 1992). The heritage of Trier and Weisgerber was archived and their work continued in Germany (Gipper and Schwarz, 1962-1985) as well as in Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, Russia, and the United States. In general, Trier's hard version of field semantics was softened and adapted to meet new theoretical challenges in linguistics as well as anthropology. However, there were also those who tried to remain more faithful to the axioms of Trier's field semantics and combine them with new insights into semantic features derived from phonology. There is no space here to give a detailed account of neo-Saussurean structural field and feature semantics or componential analysis. Let us only say that whereas structural field semantics went into the direction of cutting off any remaining links between lexical structures, conceptual structures and encyclopedic world knowledge, these links have been forcefully reinstated by modern frame semanticists. They have stressed how much our worldly and bodily experience shapes conceptual spaces pre-conceptually and pre-linguistically. Our experiences inside a socially structured world are not an amorphous mass cut up by language; they structure our meaning-making. Structural semanticists by contrast became ideologically blind not only to encyclopedic knowledge (Coseriu, 1990), but also to the graded and shaded nature of our knowledge about (to use one of the prototypical examples of structural field semantics) chairs, stools, and sofas. This gradedness had been discovered by Helmut Gipper as early as 1959, when he studied the words for 'seats' in German as a contribution to a Weisgerber Festschrift (Gipper, 1959; we use the reprint in Gipper, 1971). As Gipper's study prefigures some of the insights achieved in prototype theory, which had a huge influence on modern field and frame semantics, we shall present it here as a bridge between older pre-structuralist field theories and modern theories of fields and frames. Inside a classical semantic field of, say, words for pieces of 'furniture', all words would be

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equal, whereas in prototype theory (Rosch, 1975) 5 we have a central prototypical member of the field, which, in English, might be the word chair, around which the other words for furniture are clustered as parts of a category. The most typical words, such as chair or table, would be clustered around the centre of the field, the more atypical members, such as telephone, at the periphery. Let us see what Gipper has to say about chairs in 1959.

3.5. Semantic fields, objects and users Gipper pointed out that in some regions of the lexicon, a theory of semantic groups or fields without an analysis of the things referred to by the words in the field is blind and just as misguided as the earlier tradition of 'words and things' without fields. Taking up an example from Weisgerber's reflections on semantic fields (Weisgerber, 1954 [1950]), Gipper came to study in detail the field of 'seats', which in German is structured in part by the opposition between Sessel and Stuhl (whereas English has only one term to cover this field, namely chair, which can be modified by compounding to give armchair, for example). In 1950 Weisgerber had mused about the fact that it is relatively easy to establish lexical fields in the domain of mental and abstract terms (as Trier had done), but that this is much more difficult when we are dealing with words which designate manmade artefacts. He thought that words designating natural objects work much more like direct labels, a view rejected by Gipper. However, Weisgerber also pointed out that the lexical fields that structure man-made objects and things contain many presuppositions which go beyond the merely lexical cutting up of a conceptual field, "namely all that which integrates such a field of things (Sachbezirk) into a form of life (Lebenswelt)" (1954 [ 1950] : 98). Weisgerber tried to demonstrate this influence of our living environment on semantics with an analysis of words for containers, such as Becher, Urne or Vase, but did not get very far. In this case William Labov took up the challenge in 1973 with his classical study of the semantic space of containers mapped out between various types of cups (Labov, 1973). Gipper himself took up the challenge posed by Sessel and Stuhl and analysed their systematic semantic relations empirically. Having collected as many pictures of 'seats' as possible in catalogues and so on, he gave these pictures one by one to native speakers and asked them to name the 'seat' on the picture. Gipper collected the answers and found not only substantial variations from person to person but also from occasion to occasion, one person changing the name for a particular seat from one session to the next. There was only one 'label' on which everybody agreed and

5 In 1975 Eleanor Rosch reported the now well-known experiment carried out with American college students, in which they had to rate the goodness of example for sixty members of the category 'furniture'. As pointed out by Lakoff (1987: 43), in the late 1970s Rosch abandoned her earlier view that prototype effects might provide a characterization of the internal structure of a category. A given entity is not prototypical of a Category, but an instantiation of the prototype. Thus, as Lakoff argues, prototype effects probably result from the nature of cognitive models. (We thank the anonymous referee for prompting us to stress this point.)

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that was Liegestuhl (deck chair), which can almost be regarded as a 'terminus technicus'. It also emerged that native speakers make in fact a distinction between Sessel and Stuhl, which can therefore be considered as standing in semantic opposition. Sessel and Stuhl can be regarded as the two prototypes, or as Gipper says 'Grundvorstellungen' (Gipper, 1971: 94), around which the other 'seats' are clustered. The prototype of a Stuhl is characterized by the features: not upholstered, with a horizontal back and a vertical seat, used to reach tables, desks, etc. The prototype of a Sessel is characterized by: upholstered, comfortable, the back and seat can be less straight, and it is not used to reach a table or desk for certain purposes, but in order to relax. The rest of Gipper's analysis of the semantic and object field of 'seats', structured by these two prototypes, can serve as an object lesson for both structural field semanticists as well as for cognitive prototype semanticists. It shows quite clearly that one has to tap not only the encyclopedic knowledge of the speakers, but also their linguistic knowledge so as to understand their pragmatic naming strategies. Gipper's analysis sheds light on the intricate connections that mark the interface between concepts, words and things. To name the pictures shown to them, the subjects drew on their world-knowledge and their linguistic knowledge. Some, such as the furniture-seller, had more expert knowledge which allowed him to differentiate more clearly between various seats; some, such as the Tyrolian peasant, had less. But all relied on their linguistic knowledge inherited from their elders and therefore carrying with it not only synchronic but also diachronic knowledge. One of these diachronic facts was the very distinction between Sessel and Stuhl, which had emerged in new high German. It could not have emerged, there could have been only one word for Sessel and Stuhl, or more detailed distinctions could have been lexicalized. The fact that the German language distinguishes lexically between the two concepts constrains the lexical cutting up of the conceptual field of seats just as much as their worldly function. This suggests that language users' naming strategies are influenced by the semantic structure of the language they use, as well as by their world knowledge and their communicative intentions. To understand how we cut up what Trier had called a conceptual complex (Sinnbezirk), or in this case a complex of things (Sachbezirk), we have to pay attention to the 'reciprocity between words and things' (Gipper, 1971: 107), as well as language, cultural practices, and cognition. Gipper's (1959) linguistic analysis of the semantic field of Sitzgelegenheiten, together with Ludwig Wittgenstein's well-known philosophical analysis of the semantic field of Spiel (game) (Wittgenstein, 1958 [1953]: §66) could have provided the basis for a seamless progression from pre-structuralist field theories to field theories based on prototype analysis, conceptual mapping, and pragmatic choice strategies. However, this was not to be, as in the 1960s a structuralist period began in semantics on both sides of the Atlantic. When the 1970s came round, and with them the rise of modem field and frame theories, many of the older insights had been forgotten, but not all. Influenced by advances in anthropology and the cognitive sciences, one can observe a steady influx of new ideas in semantics, pragmatics, and the theory of

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semantic fields from the late 1960s onwards. In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published their research on color terms; in 1972 Anna Wierzbicka proposed to study emotions inside prototypical scenarios; in 1973 Labov published his pioneering work on cups; in 1973 Eleanor Rosch, inspired by Wittgenstein, published her first seminal article on the principles of human categorization and prototypes; in 1974 Adrienne Lehrer demanded that one put Trier's ideas on an empirical footing (1974: 12); and in 1975 Charles Fillmore published his seminal contribution to what came to be known as 'frame semantics', based on his earlier research into 'case frames'; he attacked all feature theories of meaning as 'checklist theories of meaning' and proposed frame semantics as an alternative approach (Fillmore, 1968, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985). Prototype theories of human categorization inspired new models of knowledge organization and knowledge representation, as well as new models of lexical organization. In psychology and Artificial Intelligence, as well as in linguistics, the term 'frame' was used to indicate the organizing principle that underlies knowledge representation on the one hand, and semantic representation on the other. Research in these fields began to overlap in many ways, as both cognitive psychologists and cognitive linguists began to focus on the conceptual underpinnings of human understanding and meaning generation.

4. Elements for a theory of semantic frames

During the 1970s the concept of 'frame' was therefore just as much in the air as the concept of 'field' had been in the 1930s. It was central to various types of study from cultural and cognitive anthropology to cognitive science. We shall only provide a very short list of possible 'leads' that a history of frame theory could follow up (see also Ungerer and Schmid, 1996: ch. 5). The roots of the frame concept reach back at least to Immanuel Kant's conception of schema, which has the function of providing a picture of a pure concept, of establishing a bridge between perception and cognition. This function of a schema was also important in the work of the psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett on memory (1932), where a schema acts as a blueprint for a mental model (Konerding, 1993: 10). But, most importantly, Kant's concept of schema influenced German Gestalt psychology, especially the distinction between figure and ground, and the chunking of knowledge representation. After having influenced field semantics at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gestalt psychology influenced frame theories in the cognitive sciences during the middle and end of this century. Towards the end of the 1950s cultural and cognitive anthropologists, such as Ward H. Goodenough and Floyd G. Lounsbury, had begun to recast older types of field semantics for the study of kinship and biological taxonomies. The anthropologist Charles O. Frake in particular introduced anthropologists to the notions of scene and frame, in part inspired by the ethnography of speaking (see Goodenough, 1964). The 1970s saw the introduction of the frame concept into the ethnographic and ecological study of society, social interaction and human experience in the works of

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Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman, which again influenced the contextual analysis of human discourse (Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1993). Eugene Charniak introduced the frame idea quite independently into Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing, for example in his study of children's story comprehension and his famous language comprehension program, Ms Malaprop (Charniak and Wilks, 1976). At the same time, Minsky (1975) also used the concept of 'frame' in the study of vision recognition and knowledge representation. Schank and Abelson (1977) studied the role of scripts (such as the restaurant script) in human understanding and this had an enormous influence on the then budding discipline of text linguistics (Metzing, 1980). Psycholinguists began to study semantic networks (e.g., Collins and Quillian, 1969). In cognitive linguistics, finally, the frame concept came to be used in conjunction with concepts like background knowledge, (image-)schema, idealized cognitive model, mental space, and so on. 6 In fact, Lakoff (1987) identifies his 'propositional ICMs' with Fillmore's frames, and Langacker's (1987) 'abstract domains' (as opposed to basic domains like space and time) are also conceived of as frame-like structures. Work in the cognitive sciences (psychology, psycholinguistics and AI) and in cognitive linguistics began to blend at many points, but at no point more than in the exploration of cognitive and semantic domains, the role of metaphor and metonymy, the function of blending, and the nature of polysemy. Whereas traditional field semantics only wanted to be a new contribution to lexical semantics, modem field and frame semantics is based on "the commitment to make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain" (Lakoff, 1990: 40). It is part of a much larger enterprise trying to achieve insights into the structure of linguistic, cognitive and neural networks.

4.1. The axiomatization of frame semantics Fillmore first used the term 'frame' in his study of case (Fillmore, 1968), where case frames are regarded as linguistic descriptions of conceptual scenes (Fillmore, 1977: 56), but, influenced by research in cognitive anthropology and AI, he then broadened the use, which became more widespread in linguistics and the cognitive sciences in general during the 1980s (Kalisz, 1981 ; Verschueren, 1981). Case frames or role frames characterize the relations between a verb and the components of its syntagmatic frame (which had been tentatively explored in post-Trier field semantics). The syntagmatic relations are given semantically or conceptually based names to describe the roles they play, such as AGENT,INSTRUMENT,OBJECTIVE, 6 Although easily conflated, one should keep in mind, that 'background knowledge' is a general cover term, whereas the other labels are very specific. Image-schemata were proposed by Mark Johnson (1987) and are usually defined as abstractions over spatial concepts; idealized cognitive models or ICMs were proposed by George Lakoff (1987) and include frames, image-schemata, metaphorical and metonymic mappings; mental spaces were originally proposed by Gilles Fauconnier (1985) and have been recently studied in greater detail by Mark Turner and Fauconnier as small conceptual packets which are constructed provisionally for a number of cognitive operations (in a sense, they are portions of ICMs).

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LOCATIVE, and so on. As we shall see, Fillmore incorporated this concept of (case) frame into his later conception of 'semantic' frame. In 1975 Fillmore defined 'frames' as "any system of linguistic choices [...] which can get associated with prototypical instances of scenes" (Fillmore, 1975: 124). Here the notion of frame was still "regarded as an array of linguistic options which were associated with so-called 'scenes'" (Ungerer and Schmid, 1996: 209), but from then onwards Fillmore gradually reinterpreted 'frames' more cognitively. Whereas Trier never really defined the relationship between conceptual field and lexical field, apart from saying that the latter maps onto and structures the former, Fillmore explored this relationship in more detail and turned the relation between conceptual field and lexical field on its head. Fillmore does not consider the conceptual field to be unstructured and only cut up into chunks by the lexical or vocabulary field. It is the conceptual schema and our chunking of knowledge in situation and context that underlies the lexical field and therefore structures it, and it is the conceptual schema that, when activated by a linguistic expression from a certain lexical field, helps the hearer to understand the meaning of the word. Meaning is therefore not so much dependent on the intrinsic differences between words in a field, instead it is the interpretative result of the interaction between the semantic field in which the word is embedded and the conceptual field that it calls up. In 1977 the semantic or lexical field is called the 'frame' and the conceptual field the 'schema' (Fillmore, 1977). To take the example of the German terms for evaluating school work, the frame of the word gut (good) would be the other terms in the field: sehr gut, geniigend, mangelhaft, and ungeniigend (very good, sufficient, poor, insufficient). The conceptual schema associated with it would be the background knowledge about how school work is evaluated in Germany. As Wittgenstein would say: forms of life structure language games, such as the one we play with marks in school. Fillmore also reanalyzed the famous example of the days of the week. He sees their meaning as depending on a whole set of interconnected notions, including knowledge about the natural cycle created by the daily movement of the sun across the sky, the standard means for reckoning when one day begins and another ends, the existence of a conventionalized calendric cycle of seven days, with a subconvention for specifying the beginning member of the cycle and the practice in our culture of assigning different portions of the week to work and to non-work (Fillmore and Atkins, 1992: 77; Goddard, 1998: 70). "If a lexical item exists, in other words, it must exist as some part of a frame and must correspond to some part of a schema" (Fillmore, 1977: 135). Using Labov's examples, Fillmore points out that the schema, say, "for the set of things one can expect to find in one's kitchen includes a prototype for cup, glass and bowl" (1977: 130). Fillmore's frame semantics has therefore close links with modem cognitive semantics, but only distant ones with structural semantics. It pays close attention to encyclopedic, pragmatic and contextual knowledge, not only semantic knowledge. In 1985, Fillmore points out more explicitly that his own conception of frame semantics has some similarities with Trier's field semantics. He quotes approvingly Trier's view that to understand the meaning of 'an individual term', the interpreter

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has to be aware of "the word's position in the field and the number of contenders" (Fillmore, 1985: 227), just as in a horse race. Trier "believed, in other words, that in general, to understand the meaning of a word was to understand the structure within which the word played its role, and that this structure had its being precisely because of the existence of the other words" (1985: 227). But unlike Trier, Fillmore always stressed that to understand a word we not only have to be conscious of its lexical neighbors in the field, we also have to know something about its 'conceptual underpinning' (1985: 228). In later years, Fillmore has tended to use the term 'frame' and not 'schema' to refer to this conceptual underpinning, the underlying conceptual structure. In order to understand words like buy, sell or charge, we have to understand the whole 'commercial transaction frame', that is, a certain stereotyped scenario (Fillmore and Atkins, 1992: 78). Individual words are said to evoke or instantiate particular elements of such frames, to perspectivize particular components of these complex knowledge structures. For example, the conceptual frame of a commercial transaction has elements such as BUYER, SELLER, PAYMENTand GOODS. Certain elements of this 'frame' are evoked when we use words such as buy and sell. This process of highlighting has similarities with the figure and ground approach in Gestalt psychology, as well as with Langacker's profiling approach in his cognitive grammar (Langacker, 1987). The first step in Fillmore's current research program called FrameNet, is therefore to find a conceptual (or semantic) frame and to go on from there, as described in this part of the overall research proposal: "Frame semantics is first of all an approach to the understanding and description of the meanings of lexical items and grammatical constructions. It begins with the uncontroversial assumption that in order to understand the meanings of the words in a language we must first have knowledge of the conceptual structures, or semantic frames, which provide the background and motivation for their existence in the language and for their use in discourse. It is assumed that an account of the meaning and function of a lexical item can proceed from a description of the underlying semantic frame to a characterization of the manner in which the item in question, through the linguistic structures that are built up around it, selects and highlights aspects or instances of that frame." (FrameNet n.y.)

5. Concluding remarks During the twentieth century one can observe an increasingly more global approach to meaning, from the study of word meaning in isolation to the study of meaning relations inside lexical fields, to the study of word use in relation to the cotext of the utterance and the context of the situation, to the study of language use in relation to dialogic and social interaction as part of a culture, and finally to the study of language use and structure in relation to cognition and computation. The development of field semantics, which peaked in the 1930s, and of frame semantics, which peaked in the 1970s, contributed strongly to this broadening of scope in semantic theories. We have tried to show that these two approaches to studying the relations between words and concepts have various features in common, but also differ quite fundamentally. Table 1 summarizes these similarities and differences.

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Table 1 Field and frame semantics: Similarities and differences

Studies

Model

Field semantics

Frame semantics

groups of words that belong together under the same conceptual heading, as grounded in: linguistic system syntagmatic/ paradigmatic relations, oppositions, differences (values) encodes linguistic information

groups of words that belong together under the same conceptual heading, as grounded in: conceptual schema/domain etc. quasi-narrative relations relations, instructions, directions

particle field, horse race

case roles, restaurant script

encodes cultural and contextual background information

Canonical examples days of the week, words for intellectual capacity

days of the week, buying and selling

Inspirations from

Humboldt, Kant biology (organism) physics Gestalt psychology research in lexicography

Aristotle (schema, figure) Humboldt, Kant geometry Gestalt psychology research into knowledge representation and memory

Emerged from

reaction against atomistic (diachronic) semasiology and onomasiology

reaction against atomistic (synchronic) feature theories of meaning

Basic tenets

language structures thought/world the meaning of a word is the totality of its possible relations with all other words in a semantic field

thought/world/body structure language word meanings are best understood in reference to the conceptual structures which support and motivate them

Range

may include study of prototypes may include the study of encyclopedic and pragmatic knowledge may include the study of valency does not include the study of frames metaphor: problem (for feature semantics)

includes study of prototypes includes the study of enclyclopedic and pragmatic knowledge includes the study of valency includes the study of semantic fields metaphor: solution (Idealized Cognitive Models, etc.)

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Brigitte Nerlich is a Research Fellow in Psychology at Nottingham University, England. She studied French and philosophy in Germany and France and was a Junior Research Fellow in general linguistics at Oxford. She has published books and articles on the history of linguistics, especially on semantics and pragmatics, on cognitive semantics, figurative language, semantic change, and language acquisition. Her last book, co-authored with David D. Clarke, Language, Action, and Context. The early history of pragmatics, 1780-1930, appeared in 1996. She is now preparing an edited book on Polysemy: Patterns of

meaning in language and cognition. David Clarke is Professor of Psychology, and Director of the Action Analysis Group, at Nottingham University, England. He has a DPhil in Psychology (Oxford) and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences (Cambridge). His main research interest is sequence analysis and its application to problems including behavior in safety-critical situations.