Swarm Verbs: Frame Semantics Approach

Abstract

This study revisits Levin’s(1993) intuition-based classification of the English swarm verb class through the lens of Frame Semantics to provide a principled account of how verb meaning constrains syntactic alternations. Corpus- informed analysis shows that swarm verbs canonically realize a ‘location subject + with-PP’ pattern, while the locative alternation is only weakly productive: promoting the Entity to subject and taking the location as object is generally marginal or awkward. Locative inversion occurs rarely in everyday usage and is largely confined to literary or rhetorical styles, and existential there-insertion is infelicitous in its simple form; however, a participial circumvention is acceptable. In contrast, causative alternation is unavailable because swarm verbs encode spontaneous aggregation rather than externally-caused compaction; induced fullness requires verbs such as fill, crowd, or pack. These findings refine Levin’s generalizations by integrating discourse and pragmatic factors with frame-based event structure, demonstrating that alternation availability follows from the profiling of Frame Elements rather than from surface form alone.