Frames of winespeak: Varieties among languages and linguistic contexts

This paper offers a preliminary investigation on the advantages of tagging and analyzing a trilingual, comparable corpus of oenological texts with frame semantics, in order to portray the complexity of verbal meanings and argument structures in this specialized domain. The overall aim of the analysis is the creation of a lexicographical tool designed for supporting users to write a specialized text in an L2. Therefore the descriptive efficacy of frames was tested with polysemous lexical units, such as the verb make, and its Italian and French equivalents (fare and faire). Results confirm that Frames warrant fine-grained semantic-syntactic analysis, which could be useful for non-native writers, provided that a specific user-friendly presentation of the data is offered. On the other hand, however, the frame inventory is still incomplete and prevents exhaustive analysis.