Frame Report

This frame covers the basic uses of direction words like the adverbs east, up, and forward. These are used either to talk about a direction of facing (e.g., facing outward, pointing left, looking downward, turn east) or to talk about actual or metaphorical motion (went up, traveling due north). Lexical units of this frame typically have a semantic type that refers to the means of determining the direction (e.g. forward.adv has the semantic type Landmark_front, meaning that "forward" is defined with respect to the direction from the center of some entity to its front, however defined). Nevertheless, some words like way.n and direction.n are used exactly when normal means of specifying direction are not available, and obligatorily occur with some other means of specifying the direction ("that way", "the same way", "the direction she went").

This frame is most frequently used to describe the motion of something along the Path from the Landmark, which is normally implicitly identified as the location of the viewpoint:

We went [north|target] . DNI

In such cases, a Distance from the Landmark can also be given:

After she was knocked on the head , it seemed like everything had moved three feet to the left . DNI

It can often be used for direction of facing, which is not compatible with the Distance frame element:

Look [left|target] and you 'll see it . DNI

Although rare for certain lexical units (e.g., upward.adv), most words in this frame are commonly used in a fictive motion pattern to identify locations that can be reached by moving in the indicated way from the Landmark:

The book was unreachable, 10 feet [up|target] on the shelf. DNI
[East|Path] of Mt. Diablo the Sierras rise majestically above the Central Valley.


In this fictive motion case, the Domain and the Independent_variable are both spatial, and should be marked as metaphorical.

Note this differs from members of the Directional_locative_relation frame (e.g., above.prep), which can only be used for relative static positions, and not for facings or for directions of motion:

??? The book faced above the door .
vs.
The book faced upward .

A potential point of confusion is that the Directional_locative_relation frame is also used for cases in which adverbs like east.adv, etc. are followed by "of", since such expressions can only be used of static relative positions and not facings:

??? I faced east of the mountains .

Another potential point of confusion is that nouns referring to directions can be used for facings if they are preceeded by the word "to". Since this use of to.prep can be found with a broader class of words like side.n, we interpret this sense of to.prep as mapping relative postitions (belonging to the Directional_locative_relation frame) to true Directions, in the sense of this frame. This applies to expressions like "to the east", as well as "to both sides" and "to the rear". In the future, we may add these as multi-word members of the frame.

In the following case, the Domain is "potency" and the Independent_variable is, as usual, time; again, the example should be marked as metaphorical.


They decided to rerate the medication downward in potency .


In mathematical terms, all of these uses can be understood as a Path, made up of a set of positions in some N-space Domain (by default spatial, or metaphorically, other domains), being determined as a function of a Landmark (which may be incorporated and is usually implicit) and some one-dimensional Independent_variable (time, or, metaphorically, other domains). The Domain and/or the Independent_variable are normally incorporated in the basic definition of the target; thus, for example, up.adv, by default, indicates the Domain is space, and time is the Independent_variable. From a linguistic point of view, we consider these literal spatio-temporal uses to be basic, and other cases, where space is replaced by some other kind of quantity, is to be understood as metaphorical.