Frame semantics (linguistics)

Okay kiddo, frame semantics is all about understanding how words and phrases relate to our knowledge of the world around us. It's like putting puzzle pieces together to make sense of what someone is saying.

Imagine you're playing with blocks, and you have different sets of blocks that represent different things - maybe some blocks are food, some are animals, and some are vehicles. Now, when someone says a sentence to you, it's like they're giving you some blocks to use. But you need to figure out which set of blocks they're giving you, so you can use the right ones to build what they're talking about.

So, let's say someone says "The cat chased the mouse." You need to know what a cat and a mouse are, what chasing looks like, and what happens when a cat catches a mouse. You get all of this information from the "animal" and "movement" sets of blocks, and by knowing about how cats and mice interact in the real world.

Now, let's say someone says "The car chased the ball." That doesn't make sense, right? You don't have a "vehicle" set of blocks, so you can't fit "car" into the sentence in a way that makes sense with the other blocks you have. This means the sentence doesn't have "semantic coherence" - it doesn't fit together in a logical way.

So, in linguistics, frame semantics is all about figuring out how the pieces of a sentence fit together to make sense, based on the knowledge we have about the world around us. It's like being a detective, and using your understanding of the context of a sentence to figure out what the speaker is trying to communicate.