Lexicon and frames in FDG: A treatment of Dutch bekend zijn ‘to be familiar, well known’, behandelen ‘to treat’ and trouwen ‘to marry’

This paper describes in detail the different meanings and combinatorial possibilities of three Dutch lexemes, bekend zijn ‘to be familiar/well known’, behandelen ‘to treat’ and trouwen ‘to marry’, in order to determine the respective roles of lexicon and predication frames at the representational (semantic) level of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). FDG analyses are proposed for each of the different senses of these lexemes and a number of theoretical issues are addressed. One of these concerns the question of how much and what kind of information needs to be provided in the meaning definition of a lexical item and what kind of information needs to be specified in a predication frame. The paper further considers the question of how lexemes and predication frames can be matched in such a way as to avoid both overgeneration and undergeneration of constructions, introducing conditions of use and constraints on combinability. It is argued that the approach opted for in FDG to store lexemes separately from the predication frames they combine with lends itself well for the analysis of the three lexemes examined, and that the lexicon, in combination with information from the conceptual component, plays an important role in the selection of the appropriate predication frames.