Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore that extends his earlier case grammar. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves, among other things, a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the goods, the relations between the seller and the goods and the money, the relation between the buyer and the goods and the money and so on. Thus, a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept to which it refers (or highlights, in frame semantic terminology).
The idea of the encyclopedic organisation of knowledge itself is old and was discussed by Age of Enlightenment philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Giambattista Vico. Fillmore and other evolutionary and cognitive linguists like John Haiman and Adele Goldberg, however, make an argument against generative grammar and truth-conditional semantics. As is elementary for Lakoffian–Langackerian Cognitive Linguistics, it is claimed that knowledge of language is no different from other types of knowledge; therefore there is no grammar in the traditional sense, and language is not an independent cognitive function. Instead, the spreading and survival of linguistic units is directly comparable to that of other types of units of cultural evolution, like in memetics and other cultural replicator theories.
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