Annotating Static Verbs

Consider the following sentence (relevant UD edges shown):

Here, we say that the (verbal) predicate owns evokes the POSSESSION frame, which defines the possessum and possessor roles. The possessum roles is filled by a house and the possessor roles is filled by Kim. So we annotate as follows:

We call the arguments that fill the predicate’s frame’s roles the core arguments. We will turn to non-core arguments later.

Note that semantic roles abstract away from syntactic alternation. As an example, consider the following passive sentences and its Superframes annotation:

Note also that there are only a few dozen superframes, so the meaning they specify is necessarily coarse. Different predicates with similar meaning can invoke the same superframe. This is a feature, as it makes explicit similar predicates and roles.

Verbs with One Argument

There are, of course, also predicates with only one argument, in which case only one of the two roles is used (most often the first one).

INTERNAL-STATE is one of those superframes whose second role state is rarely filled by an argument. It denotes an abstract entity (here: the state of being asleep) that is already expressed by the predicate.

Verbs with Zero Arguments

It also happens that predicates occur with no core arguments. One example is weather verbs such as rain. For consistency, there is a rule that says predicates with no core arguments must always be annotated with the most general superframe ENTITY. So that is what happens for example for weather verbs such as rain (which has a syntactic, but semantically empty argument):

We will turn to what NONCOMP means later.