Framenets as an incarnation of frame semantics have been set up to deal with lexicographic issues (cf. Fillmore and Baker 2010, among others). They are thus concerned with lexical units (LUs) and the conceptual structure which categorizes these together. These lexically-evoked frames, however, do not reflect pragmatic properties of constructions (LUs and other types of constructions), such as expressing illocutions or being considered polite or very informal. From the viewpoint of a multilingual annotation effort, the Global FrameNet Shared Annotation Task, we discuss two phenomena, greetings and tag questions, which highlight the necessity both to investigate the role between construction and frame annotation on the one hand and to develop pragmatic frames describing social interactions which are not explicitly lexicalized.

We propose a metric for machine translation evaluation based on frame semantics which does not require the use of reference translations or human corrections, but is aimed at comparing original and translated output directly. The metrics is described on the basis of an existing manual frame-semantic annotation of a parallel corpus with an English original and a Brazilian Portuguese and a German translation. We discuss implications of our metrics design, including the potential of scaling it for multiple languages.