Introduction

Superframes is a scheme for frame-semantic annotation of text. Every predicate is assigned a frame, and every argument is assigned a role. Superframes annotations can help search corpora for phenomena of interest, enable quantitative cross-lingual comparisons, and support semantic parsing. Superframes aims to be easy to annotate. In particular,

1. Superframes does not require a lexicon. Frames are coarse and small enough in number to learn them by heart.
2. Superframes is language-independent.
3. Superframes ia annotated atop Universal Dependencies, thus delegating many difficult syntax-related decisions to an established framework.

Superframes defines a taxonomy of frames, each of which denotes a relation between two entities and thus defines two roles. Annotating a text comes down to assigning frame labels to content words and role labels to UD dependency edges between them.

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 sentence 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. It has a syntactic, but semantically empty subject, which is annotated with NONCOMP.

Important

Predicate occurrences with no core arguments must always be annotated with the most general superframe, ENTITY.

So this is what happens for raining:

Annotating Dynamic Verbs

While all superframes denote states, many predicates, especially verbs, do not simply denote a state. Rather, they denote an event.

Note

We refer to events and states collectively as eventualities or scenes for short.

Events are distinguished from states by their temporal structure. They progress through two or more stages, each of which is itself a state or, in fact, another event.

In Superframes, events are annotated using a number of special frames called aspectual frames. You first frame a stage (which is usually a state), and then you add an aspectual frame that indicates that the predicate evokes not the stage, but an event involving the stage. There are seven aspectual frames:

Note

The frame for the stage is combined with the aspectual frame through a mechanism called stacking. We stack the aspectual frame on top of the stage frame by writing the two separated by a hyphen, meaning that the stage frame becomes the first argument of the aspectual frame. The first frame (also called the base frame) still determines the core roles that can be used.

Here is the mechanism illustrated for three different aspectual frames using POSSESSION as stage frame:

And here it is illustrated for all the aspectual frames using LOCATION as stage frame:

Further examples include:

Stacking Aspectual Frames Onto Roles

Some predicates take multiple arguments wrt. different stages. For these cases, there is a special notation where you can stack an aspectual frame atop a role. For example:

Using Aspectual Frames by Themselves

For predicates that only express aspect and nothing about the stage (which is instead denoted by an argument), aspectual frames can be used by themselves, without stacking:

Using Aspectual Frames with the META Frame

Some predicates share an argument with another argument in what is known as a control construction. They are annotated with the special META frame. Its scene role is filled by the embedded predicate, and its participant role is filled by the controlled argument.

Important

If a predicate has a participant and a scene dependent, then an additional dependency edge (not present in basic UD) must be present from the scene to the participant. This edge is called a backlink. This rule is enforced automatically by the checker.

Often, control predicates express aspect while the embedded predicate expresses a stage. Thus, stack an aspect frame onto META. For example:

Annotating Non-core Arguments

So far, we have only seen predicates with at most two arguments, all of whose roles are defined by the (base) frame that the predicate is annotated with. We call the base frame together with any frames stacked on top of it the core frame. But many verbs have more than two arguments, or otherwise arguments with roles from different frames. One very common example is causative subjects, denoting an entity presented as causing the situation denoted by the core frame. For example, consider the following:

In both sentences, the core frame is INTERNAL-STATE-INIT, with the vase as the has-state argument. In the second sentence, Kim is added as another argument, presented as the causer of the situation denoted by the core frame (the breaking of the vase). We thus annotate it with the causer role from the CAUSATION frame. To distinguish them from core arguments, non-core arguments are written in all upper case.

Note

Adding a non-core role is interpreted as implicitly adding the corresponding frame, where the dependent fills the non-core role, and the core frame fills the other role. Thus, in the example, by adding CAUSER as the non-core role, we implicitly add a CAUSATION frame whose causer role is filled by Kim, and whose effect role is filled by the breaking of the vase.

Similar examples include:

Two other very common non-core arguments are the sender and recipients (experiencers) of messages.

Other non-core arguments are usually rather predicate-specific.

Annotating Nouns and Pronouns

So far, we have only looked at verbal predicates. But nouns can have (core) arguments too. Specifically, this is true for event nouns and relational nouns.

Event nouns evoke eventualities (events or states). They are annotated much like verbs:

Relational nouns also evoke eventualities. Additionally, they refer to one of the participants in the relation. Since we are not concerned with reference, we annotate relational nouns just like event nouns:

Pronouns can function as event/relational pronouns, too. Annotate them like you would their antecedent:

Nouns and pronouns that are neither event (pro)nouns nor relational can’t have any arguments. Thus, the rule that we mentioned earlier applies: an occurrence of a predicate without any core arguments is always annotated with the special superframe ENTITY.

Annotating Adjuncts

Adjuncts are dependents of predicates that are not arguments – that is, they are not assigned a role by the predicate, but by the adjunct construction, often involving an adposition or a conjunction. All kinds of predicates can have adjuncts, including verbs, nouns, and others. Superframes does not try to distinguish between adjuncts and non-core arguments – we annotate the former just like the latter:

Attributive Adjectives and Adverbs

Attributive adjectives and adverbs behave syntactically like modifiers, but they are also predicates assigning the modifiee a role. In fact, the semantic relation that this modifier relation denotes is that the modifier evokes a scene in which the modifiee participates. We have already encountered the frame that encodes this relation in the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs: it is called META. With attributive adjectives and adverbs, we use its scene role as a non-core role, and we add a backlink for the role assigned by the modifier to the modifiee.

Important

If a predicate has a SCENE dependent, then an additional dependency edge (not present in basic UD) must be present from the dependent to the predicate. This edge is called a backlink. This rule is enforced automatically by the checker.

Relative Clauses

Relative clauses work very similarly to attributive adjectives and adverbs: they modify a predicate (usually a noun), but also act as predicates assigning that noun a role. Again, we use SCENE and add a backlink to the modified noun.

Note that relative pronouns and stranded prepositions are annotated with the same role as the antecedent.

Note also that relative clauses need not be finite, but can, e.g., be headed by participles:

Note also that the backlink need not go directly from the head of the relative clause, but can also have a more deeply embedded source:

Relation Nominal Adjuncts

Relational nouns can likewise function as adjuncts assigning the modifiee a role. If there is an adposition, its semantic contribution is weak.

Annotating Nonverbal Clauses

In the prototypical clause, the head is a verb. But there are also clauses where other kinds of predicates function as the head. We distinguish four types of such clauses: adjectival clauses, identificational clauses, nominal clauses, and oblique clauses.

Adjectival Clauses

The head of an adjectival clause is an adjective that assigns the subject a role.

Identificational Clauses

An identificational clause expresses that the subject refers to the same entity as the head. Use SAME:

Nominal Clauses

The head of a nominal clause is a noun (or pronoun) that denotes a class of entities that the subject is said to be an instance of. If the noun is relational, it assigns the subject a role:

Otherwise, use INSTANCE:

Oblique Clauses

The head of an oblique clause is marked (e.g., by an adposition, a conjunction, or by case marking) in a way that expresses a semantic relation between the subject and the head. Accordingly, the subject is assigned a non-core role:

Annotating Nonlocal Dependencies

Nonlocal dependencies are dependencies from one clause into another. They do not exist as syntactic dependencies in (basic) UD, so for Superframes annotation, we add them when needed. We have already seen nonlocal dependencies with the META frame in the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs and with attributive adjectives, adverbs, relative clauses, and relation nominal adjuncts in the chapter on Annotating Adjuncts. In both cases, the element filling the scene role has an additional dependency (a “backlink”) pointing back at the element filling the participant role.

There are a number of other constructions that systematically introduce nonlocal dependencies, which we also annotate. We give examples of each in the following.

Subject Control

Object Control

Light Verbs

From the perspective of Superframes, light verbs are just control verbs whose scene role happens to be filled by a noun. For details and examples, see META.

“Non-obligatory” Control

Here, the control relationship is contributed by an adjunct construction rather than by the predicate.

Non-obligatory Control with Parasitic Gap

Depictives

Depicitves are like non-obligatory control, but without a conjunction and with role ACCOMPANIER.

Resultatives

Resultatives are like non-obligatory control, but without a conjunction and with role EFFECT, and sometimes AFFECTED if there is no other role assigned by the matrix predicate to the controlled argument.

Raising

Attributive Adjective/Adverb/Relative Clause/Relation Nominal Adjunct

See the chapter on Annotating Adjuncts.

Pseudocleft

It-cleft

Intra-Argument Relations

If an argument is introduced by an argument structure construction and semantically related to another argument rather than to the predicate, use REGARD.

Coordination

Annotating Multiword Predicates

Multiword predicates are predicates that consist of multiple words. They include light verb constructions, which we annotate with the META frame. Other dependents that do not fill a role of the head predicate but rather are part of the predicate – as in verbal idioms, weather verbs, existential there, names, other fixed expressions, or specialized sublanguages for such things as dates and times – are marked with NONCOMP:

In some cases, the arguments of a multiword predicate depend on different components. If the component heads a core argument of the multiword predicate, give it the same frame as the head component. Otherwise, use ENTITY.

Light Verb Constructions vs. Verbal Idioms

Sometimes the borders between light verb constructions and verbal idioms are blurry. As a general rule, you should treat them as light verb predicates only if the dependent noun denotes the same kind of eventuality as the whole predicate. Otherwise, treat it as a verbal idiom.

For example, (to) do somebody a favor is a light verb predicate whereas (to) do somebody a kindness is not, because while both denote a favor, so does the noun favor by itself whereas kindness does not.

Bound Pronouns

Bound pronouns that are part of multiword predicates (e.g., inherently reflexive verbs) are annotated with the same role as their antecedent:

Exocentric Predicates

Occasionally, there is no (direct) syntactic connection between the components of a multiword predicate. For example as … as … could be analyzed as a predicate with two components, as could too … to …. We do not currently have a way to mark this, so we just annotate the parts as if each part were a full predicate.

Principles for Annotation

Prefer Core Roles over Non-core Roles

Thus:

Rather than:

Try Adding Arguments

When not sure how to frame a predicate, it can help to think of additional arguments that the predicate could have and that are just not realized in this instance. For example, what is the role of It in It is not important? If we add an argument, we might get It is not important for the process, where INFLUENCE seems to fit with It as influence and the process as affected. Thus:

Similarly:

Alternative Framings

Often, both a literal and a more figurative reading of a predicate are salient and compete for the framing. You can annotate both possibilities: separate the literal and the figurative frame/role by the symbol >>.

If two framings seems equally plausible to you and are not in a literal-figurative relationship, use || instead of >>.

Use Comments if Not Sure

You are encouraged to use comments to note down any doubts and thoughts. Comments can be added to the end of any line using the # symbol:

[TIME] generally (19) # ?
[has-time] fair (20)
[has-time] to - middling (24)

Obliqueness

Some predicates, such as friend or identical, denote an inherently symmetric relationship. Thus, their arguments are semantically virtually indistinguishable. In such cases, we default to giving the syntactically less oblique realized argument the first role, and the more oblique one, if any, the second. For our purposes, obliqueness is defined as follows:

Thus we have, e.g.:

Terminology

This is a list of terms and how they are used in this manual (not necessarily in linguistics in general, though I try to be compatible with widespread usage).

Extended Examples

Here we show the annotation of some full sentences:

ENTITY

This is the top of the superframe hierarchy, i.e., the most general frame. It is also the only frame that defines 0 rather than 2 roles. It is used for all those and only those occurrences of content words that do not have any core arguments, including all pronouns and all proper names.

Note that we go strictly by occurrence: the same word in another context may well have core arguments and thus be framed differently.

SITUATION

Roles: situee, situator

This superframe is the ancestor of all other superframes except ENTTIY. It denotes a situation in the most general sense: some entity (the situee) is in a situation, whatever the nature of that situation may be. If there is another core argument, it is labeled situator and the situation is then some sort of relation between two entities. There are four usual ways to use this frame:

Stacked with -DYN

Used for predicates that describe processes that cannot easily be framed in terms of a state but that involve complex transitions through multiple hetereogeneous states:

Stacked with an Aspectual or Modal Frame

This often occurs with predicates that focus on aspect or made, leaving the precise nature of the relation between the two arguments underspecified.

As a Default Frame

Use SITUATION if an entity is described as being in a state, but it is not internal and there is not other frame that seems to fit better.

ACCOMPANIMENT

Roles: accompanied, accompanier

accompanier accompanies accompanied, meaning that it occurs together with it or participates equally in the same event.

Often, the accompanier denotes not the accompanying event but an entity participating in it, and must be metonymically understood as the event.

COMBINATION

Roles: combined, combined-with

Special case of ACCOMPANIMENT where the two arguments are combined to form something new. Also use this for algebraic operations.

COMPARISON

Roles: compared, reference

compared is characterized with respect to reference.

reference need not be an entity similar to the compared, it can also be an abstract constraint:

COMPETITION

Roles: competitor, cocompetitor

Denotes the outcome of a struggle or a competition. For the process of competition, stack an aspectual frame.

CONCESSION

Roles: asserted, conceded

Special case of COMPARISON, indicating a contrast between something that’s the case (conceded) and something that seems to contradict it but is the case anyway (asserted).

IDENTITY

Roles: same, same-as

same is the same entity as same-as.

The frame can be used to annotate (rare) syntactic links between two descriptions of the same event:

IDENTIFIER

Roles: identified, identifier

identified is identified by identifier. identifier can be a name, an ID, a logo, or some other type of identifier.

INFLUENCE

Roles: affected, influence

influence is or exerts an influence over affected. affected can, among other things, be a beneficiary or a maleficiary.

CAUSATION

Roles: effect, causer

effect is brought about by causer.

CREATION

Roles: creation, creator

Special case of CAUSATION that is used in connection with EXISTENCE-INIT events, when the causer is the creator.

EXPRESSION

Roles: sent, sender

sender originates a message, sent, that can be perceived.

PERFORMANCE

Roles: work, performer

performer performs a work (of art).

MEANS

Roles: end, means

means is an intermediary causer of or is destined to serve an end (i.e., a purpose).

ASSET

Roles: has-asset, asset

has-asset is an exchange or wager or a good or service subject to an exchange or wager, and asset is given or offered in return.

MEDIUM

Roles: transmission, medium

medium is used to effect a transmission.

REACTION

Roles: reaction, trigger

trigger triggers a reaction in some other, more direct causer.

CONDITION

Roles: has-condition, condition

condition is presented as a (necessary or sufficient) condition for has-condition.

EXCEPTION

Roles: has-exception, exception

exception is an exception to has-exception.

LIMIT

Roles: limited, limit

The denotation of the limited dependent is restricted to the denotation of the limit dependent. With words like only, only one role is usually realized as a syntactic dependency. In the following examples, we nevertheless add the other role for clarity.

PROPORTION

Roles: numerator, denominator

Used to indicate proportional amounts.

EXPERIENCE

Roles: experiencer, experienced

Special case of INFLUENCE where experienced is a MESSAGE and experiencer is (potentially) affected by it through sensory or mental perception. Addressees of messages can be labeled experiencer even if we don’t know if they ever perceive the message.

REASON

Roles: has-reason, reason

reason is a reason for has-reason. Useful if the reason is too vague or indirect or epistemic to call it a cause.

INTERNAL-STATE

Roles: has-state, state

The entity with the has-state role is in a state that is construed as internal to it, rather than consisting in its relation to some other entity. Typical examples include things such as being open or closed, whole or broken, asleep or awake.

Because there is no “other entity”, the second role of this frame and all its subframes is rarely used. It denotes the state itself, which is normally fully expressed by the predicate and does not need another argument. If the state was fully expressed by another argument, the predicate should have META as its base frame. However, there are some cases (rare in English) where a predicate and an argument jointly express a state, illustrated below with the QUANTITY frame. In such cases, INTERNAL-STATE and its subframes can appear with a second core argument.

POSE

Roles: has-pose, pose

Special case of INTERNAL-STATE desribing someone or something’s internal spatial configuration, e.g., body pose or posture.

PROPERTY

Roles: has-property, property

A special case of INTERNAL-STATE where the state is construed as stable, i.e.,

a concept that describes something that persists over time, and is construed to be a relatively inherent characteristic of the object over its lifetime. Example: being smart or being heavy (of a stone slab) are stable states. The stability of states is a matter of construal; a state construed as stable may change – for example, a tall tree whose top is broken off.

(Croft 2002)

QUANTITY

Roles: has-quantity, quantity

quantity is the quantity, degree, or extent of has-quantity.

For counts or lengths of eventualities, use TIME instead:

RANK

Roles: has-rank, rank

rank indicates the order that has-rank has in some sequence.

REALITY

Roles: has-reality, reality

Property of predicate occurrences, describing the relationship between the predicate used and the eventuality it describes in terms of how true or certain (vs. false or speculative) it is.

EXISTENCE

Roles: existent, existence

Used to indicate that something exists. Use EXISTENCE only for non-eventualities like objects. For eventualities, use REALITY or a bare aspectual frame instead.

LITERALITY

Roles: has-literality, literality

Property of predicate occurrences, describing the relationship between the predicate used and the eventuality it describes in terms of how literal (vs. figurative) it is.

PRECISION

Roles: has-precision, precision

Property of predicate occurrences, describing the relationship between the predicate used and the eventuality it describes in terms of how precise (vs. vague) it is.

NECESSITY

Roles: necessary, necessity

Used to indicate that something is necessary, either in an epistemic or deontic sense.

NEG

Roles: negated, negation

This frame denotes negation. It can be used by itself or stacked onto META or other frames.

POSSIBILITY

Roles: possible, possibility

Used to indicate that something is possible, or someone is capable of something.

LOCATION

Roles: has-location, location

Describes has-location as located with respect to location.

CONTACT

Roles: ornament, surface

Special case of LOCATION where ornament is on the surface of something.

CONTAINMENT

Roles: contained, container

Describes contained as contained in container. Also used for events of ingestion and excretion.

ORIENTATION

Roles: oriented, landmark

oriented is oriented in space with respect to landmark.

PURSUIT

Roles: pursuer, pursued

Denotes a state where pursuer has arrived in a location by following pursued there. To denote the process of pursuing, stack an aspectual frame.

WRAPPING-WEARING

Roles: worn, wearer

Used for events of wrapping and wearing, where the borders between containment and contact are fluid.

MESSAGE

Roles: content, message2

message2 is a message about content or whose content is content. It may exist in expressed, perceived, and/or recorded form. Combine with SENDER, EXPERIENCER, and/or MEDIUM as needed.

Message Initiation and Deinitiation

When a message is created through expression or perception (including observation), use INIT:

Predicates that denote the deinititation of perception use MESSAGE-DEINIT:

Message Predicates with Control Constructions

Some predicates express their content through a control construction, in which case combine with META:

content is used for reported speech, direct or indirect:

The message2 Role

The message2 role should only be used in those cases where the predicate refers to a message by itself, and so does the argument. For example:

By contrast, for a light predicate like gave, use META:

And with predicates of perception, use content for the message, because it existed before the perception:

Messages without the MESSAGE Frame

When there is no content or message2 argument, predicates of expression are annotated with EXPRESSION, and predicates of perception, with EXPERIENCE.

Special Kinds of Messages

Gesture is a kind of expression, too:

For normative and evaluative messages, use NORM or EVALUATION, respectively.

EVALUATION

Roles: evaluee, evaluation

Special case of MESSAGE that involves an emotion or judgment of value or expectedness about evaluee.

Predicates that encode an exclamative construction, expressing “a strong emotional reaction to a propositional content” (Nivre et al., 2026) or similar, can be annotated as EVALUATION, too:

NORM

Roles: norm-content, norm2

A special case of MESSAGE that does not make a descriptive claim, but is about how things should be. This includes wishes, orders, goals, etc.

META

Roles: participant, scene

This frame is used to annotate control predicates where one dependent is itself a predicate that assigns one or more other dependents a role. The former gets the scene role, the latter get the participant role. The role assigned by the scene must be annotated through an additional dependency from scene to participant or one of its dependents (a “backlink”).

When the scene dependent is a noun, this is often called a light verb construction:

When a copula or auxiliary verb is promoted to syntactic head of a clause because of ellipsis, it is also framed as META:

It is possible for scene to assign two different dependents of the META predicate two different roles. The META predicate should assign both of them the participant role:

On the other hand, META predicates may have arguments that are not members of the embedded scene, such as CAUSER:

The non-core role SCENE is used for adjectives, adverbs, and relative clauses, which also assign their syntactic head a role, annotated through a backlink:

NONCOMP

Roles: has-noncomp, noncomp

Pseudoframe used to mark syntactic dependents that are part of a multiword predicate. Should only be used as a non-core role.

PERTINENCE

Roles: belongs, belongs-with

belongs belongs to or with belongs-with, typically in a not very precisely specified sense.

This frame can be used, e.g., to annotate possessives that do not denote something more specific like literal possession or a part-whole relationship:

It can also be used to annotate adjectives that can be paraphrased as of or relating to X:

PART-WHOLE

Roles: part, whole

part is part of whole.

For things like the entire planet or a whole herd of elephants, use QUANTITY instead:

INSTANCE

Roles: instance, class

instance is an element or subset of the set denoted by class.

MATERIAL

Roles: material, object

A special case of PART-WHOLE where object does not just contain material, but is said to be made from it.

SUBSCENE

Roles: subscene, superscene

A part-whole relationship that holds between two scenes (i.e., eventualities, i.e., states or events). subscene is part of the superscene.

DYN

Roles: stage, process

process is a dynamic process involving possibly multiple occurrences of stage.

This frame and its subframes are used extensively in annotating dynamic predicates – they “convert” from the basic frames, which all denote states, to stacked frames denoting dynamic processes.

Apart from that DYN can also be used for adjectives and adverbs that modify a process-denoting predicate and describe its internal unfolding over stages:

CONTINUATION

Roles: continued, continuation

continuation is an event with continued as an initial subeventuality that continues throughout continuation.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

DEINIT

Roles: deinitiated, deinitiation

deinitiation is an event with deinitiated as an initial subeventuality, acting towards the end of deinitiated.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

HABIT

Roles: habitual, habit

habit is an event with habitual as a frequent or usual subeventuality.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

INIT

Roles: initiated, initiation

initiation is an event acting towards the bringing about of initiated, with initiated as a possible final subeventuality.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

PREVENTION

Roles: prevented, prevention

prevention is an event as part of which the eventuality prevented fails to come about.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

TRANSIT

Roles: transitory, transition

transition is an event during which the eventuality transitory comes about and ends, possibly repeatedly.

For examples, see the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs.

SOCIAL-RELATION

Roles: socially-related, socially-related-to

socially-related is socially related to socially-related-to with no clear hierarchy. Use BOND otherwise.

BOND

Roles: tied, tied-to

A SOCIAL-RELATION that can be framed as a bond, tie, or obligation of an individual to another individual, group, office, task, punishment, etc.

POSSESSION

Roles: possessum, possessor

possessor possesses possessum, i.e, has control over it through power and opportunity or through a social construct such as law.

REGARD

Roles: has-regard, regard

Used for dependents that are in a semantic relation not so much with their head but with one or more of its dependents (or a descendant of one). A backlink is required from the former to the latter. When unsure which of two dependents to annotate with REGARD, choose the more oblique one.

TIME

Roles: has-time, time

Indicates when, how often, or for how long has-time takes place relative to time, which may be a point or span in time, or another event.

AGE

Roles: has-age, age

Special case of TIME that is about for how long somebody or something has existed.

SEQUENCE

Roles: follows, followed

follows and followed are two related eventualities – or, by metonymy, participants in related eventualities – where (barring unusual circumstances such as time travel) follows follows followed in time, but they are not only related temporally, but also logically, in the sense that followed sets up some kind of expectation of follows or its possibility.

COPY

Roles: copy, original

copy occurs similarly to or is created after the model of (but can differ from) original.

FULFILMENT

Roles: fulfiller, fulfilled

fulfilled is a promise or expectation or plan, etc., that is fulfilled by fulfiller.

SUBSTITUTION

Roles: substitute, replaced

replaced is replaced with substitute.

References

Joakim Nivre, William Croft, André V. Lopes Coneglian (2026). Speech Act Constructions in Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW). Association for Computational Linguistics.

William Croft (2022). Morphosyntax: constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge University Press.

Leon Stassen (1997). Intransitive Predication. Oxford University Press.