Contents of this chapter:

What are local frames?
an example

What are local frames?

Local frames are an approximation to subcategorization and selectional contexts for lexical heads. The user specifies a head whose contexts are to be found and displayed. This head consists of a part-of-speech category and a lexical item of that category. CorpusSearch then returns a list of the contexts in which the specified POS,word pair occurs in the corpus.

Each context is a string of sister nodes of the POS label(s) specified in the query. The list of contexts is organized into subgroups that share the same "kernel," where a kernel is the subset of the sister nodes whose phrasal category is NP*; that is, subjects and objects. If a PP occurs in a local frame, its head preposition is given immediately following the PP label in the output.

This functionality is under development. Use it with care. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

an example

The following query: 

node: IP*

local_frames: (VB* over +tank*|thank*)

results in this output (only the beginning is shown): 

/*
PREFACE:
CorpusSearch copyright Beth Randall 2000.
Date:  Tue Sep 21 10:08:43 EDT 2004

command file:     test/frames.q
output file:      test/frames.out

local frames:  (VB* over  +tank*|thank*)
*/

/*
NP-SBJ VB thankyn NP-OB2
*/

ALSO NP-SBJ MD VB NP-OB2 (ID CMKEMPE,57.1270)
CONJ NP-SBJ MD TO VB NP-OB2 PP for (ID CMKEMPE,46.1024)

/*
NP-SBJ VBD +tankyd NP-OB2
*/

NP-SBJ VBD NP-OB2 PP for (ID CMKEMPE,58.1308)
VBD NP-OB2 ADVP PP-RSP +terfore (ID CMKEMPE,78.1765)

/*
NP-SBJ VBD thankyd NP-OB2
*/

ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ IP-PPL VBD NP-OB2 PP as IP-PPL (ID CMKEMPE,224.3620)
ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ IP-PPL VBD NP-OB2 PP of (ID CMKEMPE,133.3113)
ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ VBD NP-OB2 PP of (ID CMKEMPE,25.533)
CONJ ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ PP wyth VBD NP-OB2 PP of IP-PPL (ID CMKEMPE,87.1978)
CONJ ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ VBD NP-OB2 ADVP PP of IP-PPL (ID CMKEMPE,94.2146)
CONJ ADVP-TMP NP-SBJ VBD NP-OB2 PP of IP-PPL (ID CMKEMPE,13.255)