DOI: 10.18485/judig.2026.2.ch27 ISSN:

А FrameNet Аnalysis of Serbian Verbs Kidati and Cepati : Frames vs Traditional Word Sense Disambiguation

Marina Bagi, Aleksandra Marković, Ely Matos
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This paper presents an analysis of two Serbian verbs, kidati (‘tear’, ‘rip’, depending on context) and cepati (‘tear’, ‘rip’, ‘chop’), from a Frame Semantics perspective and compares the results of this analysis with the senses of these verbs identified in two Serbian monolingual descriptive dictionaries. This research has multiple aims: to offer a Frame Semantics analysis of these verbs; to populate the Serbian FrameNet database with new frames evoked by these verbs; to broaden the scope of the existing frame inventory; and to highlight new insights from this analysis and compare them with insights from traditional lexicographic description. The analysis, conducted on around 180 sentences containing these two verbs from three Serbian language corpora, follows a corpus-driven, lemma-by-lemma approach to examine all senses of the target verbs. In addition, we adopted the lexicographic annotation of corpus sentences selected for predetermined target lexical units.

Our analysis yielded 21 frames for the verb kidati and 18 frames for the verb cepati . Because these verbs are partial synonyms, we identified 9 frames shared by both verbs. The analysis was driven by the semantic and syntactic distribution of lexical units (sublexemes), not by the predetermined decision on the number of semantic frames. Thus, we reached the limits of the existing frame inventory and had to introduce new frames. Finally, we compared our results with the descriptions and sense inventories of these lexemes in Serbian descriptive dictionaries. This comparison showed, as expected, that frames and dictionary senses do not correspond one-to-one. Instead, they are related in a complex way.

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