Semantic Frames as Interlingual Representations for Crosslinguistic Comparison: a Quantitative Analysis of Spontaneous Texts

Abstract

Recent advancements in frame semantics have shifted toward multilingual applications, proposing semantic frames as interlingual representations or platforms for comparison in contrastive linguistics. Building on these proposals, this study demonstrates the effectiveness and descriptive power of frames and frame systems in crosslinguistic comparison, through a quantitative analysis of customer reviews for a dish soap product in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Departing from traditional reliance on translation data, we utilize these spontaneous texts to uncover different inherent linguistic preferences of frames and lexical choices within a shared conceptual domain.