Annotating Non-core Arguments

So far, we have only seen predicates with at most two arguments, all of whose roles are defined by the the superframe that the predicate is annotated with (the core frame). But many verbs have more than two arguments, or otherwise arguments with roles from different frames. One very common example is causative subjects, denoting an entity presented as causing the situation denoted by the core frame. For example, consider the following:

In both sentences, the core frame is INTERNAL-STATE-INIT, with the vase as the has-state argument. In the second sentence, Kim is added as another argument, presented as the causer of the situation denoted by the core frame (the breaking of the vase). We thus annotate it with the causer role from the CAUSATION frame. To distinguish them from core arguments, non-core arguments are written in all upper case.

Note

On a technical level, the non-core CAUSATION frame is interpreted as being added “around” the core INTERNAL-STATE-INIT frame so that the latter fills the former other role (the effect role). This makes sense: the vase breaking is the effect here.

Similar examples include:

Two other very common non-core arguments are the sender and recipients (experiencers) of messages.

Other non-core arguments are usually rather predicate-specific.