Frame Report

This frame presents a situation where there is a certain Number of instances of an Entity or a certain Number that quantifies a Unit. Numbers are used to count any kind of Entity that has distinct individuals, or alternatively, to count Units whose own function is to quantify some property, with the Number associated with each word of this frame differentiating groups, individuals, parts of individual Entitys of different sizes, or to differentiate the quantity of the Units. A countable Entity prototypically occupies its own space separately from other instances of the Entity, and each instance of the Entity has specific kinds of parts or substance or characteristics as specified by the kind of Entity it is described as. Units (e.g., hours, inches, dozens) have the function of quantifying some property and as a result, naturally occur with a Number to say how the current property compares to the standard quantification of the Unit. Less prototypical numbers, which occur much more frequently with Units rather than Entitys, describe situations with less than a whole Unitor Entity (half.n), or the lack of a Unit or Entity (zero.num).

There is also a Precision associated with the Number. In most cases, there is a certain amount of imprecision in the Number that is assumed, especially for so-called "round" numbers like twenty.num or hundred.num, and for the class of approximate numbers, like couple.n; for other numbers, e.g. two.num, the expected precision is very high. Separately from this inherent possibility of precision or imprecision, numbers may be modified by an explicit specification of their Precision, with phrases like "about", etc.

Only [two|Number] senators voted in support of the president .
Dr. Malik has confined almost a [score|Num] of such unfortunates in his basement, you know.
We endured [forty|Number] days of snow .
There were [thirty|Num|target] of the little blue creatures staring up at him.
She had only two pieces of Halloween candy left, but I still had [ten|Number]! DNI
The ship was [three|Number] degrees off course .


This frame includes extrathematic FEs for a set of non-lexical constructions that put together quantifying expressions. Firstly, a Number may itself be quantified by having a certain Multiplier, e.g. "three hundred". Secondly, a sequence of numerical expressions may be strung together, with or without "and", to produce a Composite_number representing a Number that is the sum of the constituent numbers and that collectively modifies the Entity or Unit.

Stephen has more than five|mul [hundred|target] in his closet! DNI


As can be seen in the first of the next two examples, when the target is a number in front of another number in the function of a Multiplier, we consider the number it is modifying to be a Unit:

There are just over [six|Number] billion people in the world today.
There are just over|deg six [billion|Num|target] people in the world today.

The relationship between numbers, as lexical units in this frame, and the broader category of numbers is a complex one. In particular, there is a semiotic system that arranges the tiny set of numeral symbols (0, 1, 2 ... 9), with some additional symbols (commas, decimal points, fraction lines, scientific notation of exponents) to generate a standard representation for numbers that, while not universal, is at least language independent. Our description of numbers is focused on the English system of numbers, as would occur in the spoken language or in pronunciations (actually decodings) of written numerals in English. Since numerals are well-understood by virtually all speakers of most languages, and are well-processed by computers, we do not view the description of these structures in FrameNet as necessary. As a convenience, we include numerals as wordforms when they coincide with a basic number word of English (e.g., "3" is a wordform of three.num).

Of more interest for the FrameNet Project is the large number of idiosyncrasies in the constructions that use numbers, very few of which will be well-exemplified in our annotation. These include indications of range (from ... to), approximation (in the neighborhood of), and descriptions of group properties ("A whopping three singers showed up")



Technical note: The frame as currently devised does not distinguish between "six apples" and "six of the apples". It is clear that in the first case, we are talking about six entities that fit whatever properties apples have. In the second case, however, there is a specific set of apples that was already under discussion, and the six apples are members of this set. There is a way of understanding this second case in terms of the first, namely, that "six of the apples" is interpreted as six entities with the property of being members of the given set of apples. Since understanding the second case involves an additional notion of set membership, this could be indicated with a different FE than any we currently have in this frame, perhaps *Set, which is in an exclusion relation with Entity. However, the major semantic distinction between these two types of Entity is whether there is a definite set, and this distinction is independently indicated by the definite article in examples like "six of the apples".