Semantic frames.

'Crawl' is, apparently, an instance of the "Self-Movement" semantic frame. Here are some of the frame elements that Fillmore and Atkins have identified (the table is a close-as-possible reproduction of the one appearing in Ravin and Leacock's (eds) Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches. , 2002).

...............................TABLE 5.4 Elements in the self-movement frame
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frame.............As exemplified in a corpus sentence
element
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mover.............David Attenborough was crawling up behind two copulating lions.
Area................Literally on hands and knees, his men crawled over every inch of the area
Path.................A cat can crawl through any hole it can get its head through
Source.............The two hedgehogs crawled from the nest at sunset
Goal.................They would never find her if she crawled into a cupboard and hid away
Distance...........From there they crawled the last ten yards to the edge of a rise
Manner............A small baby crawled out on its hands and knees, its face covered in grime
Speed...............I crawled smartly after him
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/

To access the frames, click on 'FN DATA'; you can then browse using the 'Index by Lexical Unit' (c - crawl) or the 'Index by Frame' (if you know the frame you are looking for).

M56

First `posted by Fluffyhamster on Dave's ESL forum.

[Tdol]

I had never thought of all the possibilities for 'crawl' . I'll have to look through the site later in more detail,but at first view it looks interesting.

Originally Posted by tdol

I had never thought of all the possibilities for 'crawl' . I'll have to look through the site later in more detail,but at first view it looks interesting.

Good hunting,