Linguistics according to Fillmore

While people keep banging on about Chomsky as being the be all and end all of linguistics (I’m looking at you philosophers of language), there have been many linguists who have had a much more substantial impact on how we actually think about language in a way that matters. In my post on why Chomsky is not really a linguist at all I listed a few.

Sadly, one of these linguists died yesterday. It was Charles J Fillmore who was a towering figure among linguists without writing a single book. In my mind, he changed the face of linguistics three times with just three articles (one of them co-authored). Obviously, he wrote many more but compared to his massive impact, his output was relatively modest. His ideas have been with me all through my life as a linguist and on reflection, they form a foundation about what I know language to be. Therefore, this is not so much an obituary (for which I’m hardly the most qualified person out there) as a manifesto for a linguistics of a truly human language.

The case for Fillmore

The first article, more of a slim monograph at 80 odd pages, was Case for Case (which, for some reason, I first read in Russian translation). Published in 1968 it was one of the first efforts to find deeper functional connections in generative grammar (following on his earlier work with transformations). If you’ve studied Chomskean Government and Binding, this is where thematic roles essentially come from. I only started studying linguistics in 1991 which is when Case for Case was already considered a classic. Particularly in Prague where function was so important. But even after all those years, it is still worth reading for any minimalist  out there. Unlike so many in today’s divided world, Fillmore engaged with the whole universe of linguistics, citing Halliday, Tesniere, Jakobson,  Whorf, Jespersen, and others while giving an excellent overview of the treatment of case by different theories and theorists. But the engagement went even deeper, the whole notion of ‘case’ as one “base component of the grammar of every language” brought so much traditional grammar back into contact with a linguistics that was speeding away from all that came before at a rate of knots.

From today’s perspective, its emphasis on the deep and surface structures, as well as its relatively impoverished semantics may seem a bit dated, but it represents an engagement with language used to express real meaning.  The thinking that went into deep cases transformed into what has become known as Frame Semantics (“I thought of each case frame as characterizing a small abstract ‘scene’ or ‘situation’, so that to understand the semantic structure of the verb it was necessary to understand the properties of such schematized scenes” [1982]) which is where things really get interesting.

Fillmore in the frame

When I think about frame semantics, I always go to his 1982 article Frame Semantics published in the charmingly named conference proceedings ‘Linguistics in the morning calm’ but it had its first outing in 1976. George Lakoff used it as one of the key inspirations to his idealized cognitive models in Women, Fire, and Dangerous things which is where this site can trace its roots. As I have said before, I essentially think about metaphors as a special kinds of frames.

In it, he says:

By the term ‘frame’ I have in mind any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand anyone of them you have to  understand the whole structure in which it fits; when one of the things in such a structure is introduced into a text, or into a conversation, all of the others are automatically made available. I intend the word ‘frame’ as used here to be a general cover term for the set of concepts variously known, in the literature on natural language understanding, as ‘schema: ‘script’, ‘scenario’, ‘ideational scaffolding’, ‘cognitive model’, or ‘folk theory’.

It is a bit of a mouthful but it captures in a paragraph the absolute fundamentals of the semantics of human language as opposed to projecting the rules of formal logic and truth conditions onto an impoverished version of language that all the generative-inspired approaches try to do. Also, it brings together many other concepts from different fields of scholarship. Last year I presented a paper on the power of the concept of frame where I found even more terms that have a close affinity to it which only underscores the far reaching consequences of Fillmore’s insight.

As I was looking for some more quotes from that article, I realized that I’d have to pretty much cut and paste in the whole of it. Almost, every sentence there is pure gold. Rereading it now after many many years, it’s becoming clear how many things from it I’ve internalized (and frankly, reinvented some of the ideas I forgot had been there).

Constructing Fillmore

About the same time, and merging the two earlier insights, Fillmore started working on the principles that have come to be known as construction grammar. Although, by then, the ideas were some years old, I always think of his 1988 article with Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Conner as a proper construction grammar manifesto. In it they say:

The overarching claim is that the proper units of a grammar are more similar to the notion of construction in traditional and pedagogical grammars than to that of rule in most versions of generative grammar.

Constructions, according to Fillmore have these properties:

1. They are not limited to the constituents of a single syntactic tree. Meaning, they span what has been considered as the building blocks of language.

2. They specify at the same time syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic information.

3. Lexical items can also be viewed as constructions (this is absolutely earth shattering and I don’t think linguistics has come to grips with it, yet).

4. They are idiomatic. That is, their meaning is not built up from their constituent parts.

Although Lakoff’s study of ‘there constructions’ in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things came out a year earlier (and is still essential reading), I prefer Fillmore as an introduction to the subject (if only because I never had to translate it).

The beauty of construction grammar (just as the beauty of frame semantics) is in that it can bridge much of the modern thinking about language with grammatical insights and intuitions of generations of researchers from across many schools of thought. But I am genuinely inspired by its commitment to language as a whole, expressed in the 1999 article by Fillmore and Kay:

To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English as illustrated in 1, and the more idiomatic patterns, such as those exemplified in 2, stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar  must provide an account.

(1) a. What have you done?  b. Never will I leave you. c. So will she. d. Long may you prosper! e. Had I known, . . . f. Am I tired! g. . . . as were the others h. Thus did the hen reward Beecher.

(2) a. by and large b. [to] have a field day c. [to] have to hand it to [someone]  d. (*A/*The) Fool that I was, . . . e. in x’s own right

Given such a commitment, the construction grammarian is required to develop an explicit system of representation, capable of encoding economically and without loss of generalization all the constructions (or patterns) of the language, from the most idiomatic to the most general.

Notice that they don’t just say ‘language’ but ‘each language’. Both of those articles give ample examples of how constructions work and what they do and I commend them to your linguistic enjoyment.

Ultimately, I do not subscribe to the exact version of construction grammar that Fillmore and Kay propose, agreeing with William Croft that it is still too beholden to the formalist tradition of the generative era, but there is something to learn from on every page of everything Fillmore wrote.

Once more with meaning: the FrameNet years

Both frame semantics and construction grammar impacted Fillmore’s work in lexicography with Sue Atkins and culminated in FrameNet a machine readable frame semantic dictionary providing a model for a semantic module to a construction grammar. To make the story complete, we can even see FrameNet as a culmination of the research project begun in Case for Case  which was the development of a “valence dictionary” (as he summarized it in 1982). While FrameNet is much more than that and has very much abandoned the claim to universal deep structures, it can be seen as accomplishing the mission of a language with meaning Fillmore set out on in the 1960s.

Remembering Fillmore

I only met Fillmore once when he came to lecture at a summer school in Prague almost twenty years ago. I enjoyed his lectures but was really too star struck to take advantage of the opportunity. But I saw enough of him to understand why he is remembered with deep affection and admiration by all of his colleagues and students whose ranks form a veritable who’s who of linguists to pay attention to.

In my earlier post, I compared him in stature and importance to Roman Jakobson (even if Jakobson’s crazy voluminous output across four languages dwarfs Fillmore’s – and almost everyone else’s). Fillmore was more than a linguist’s linguist, he was a linguist who mattered (and matters) to anyone who wanted (and wants) to understand how language works beyond a few minimalist soundbites. Sadly it is possible to meet graduates with linguistics degrees who never heard of Jakobson or Fillmore. While it’s almost impossible to meet someone who doesn’t know anything about language but has heard of Chomsky. But I have no doubt that in the decades of language scholarship to come, it will be Fillmore and his ideas that will be the foundation upon which the edifice of linguistics will rest. May he rest in peace.

Post Script

I am far from being an expert on Fillmore’s work and life. This post reflects my personal perspective and lessons I’ve learned rather than a comprehensive or objective reference work. I may have been rather free with the narrative arc of his work. Please be free with corrections and clarifications. Language Log reposted a more complete profile of his life.

References