Frames, constructions, and metaphors in Spanish FrameNet

In this article, I outline the fundamental aspects of how frame semantics is applied to lexical analysis in the Spanish FrameNet project (SFN). To this end, I describe the process of semantic annotation in SFN and the software tools we use, and how we have used our annotated sentences as a training corpus to implement automatic semantic-role labelling for Spanish. I then describe our initial forays into the study of Spanish grammatical constructions, in which we are integrating frame semantics into syntactic analysis. Finally, I discuss SFN’s procedure for annotating metaphors and show how frame semantics can be used to analyse their emergent meanings.