seclauses

Seclauses are a conceptual unit used in some theories of formal semantics and computational linguistics to represent the semantic content of sentences. They focus on predicate-argument structure rather than surface word order, recording who does what to whom, when, and under what conditions. The term is often used to describe a clause-like representation that captures meaning across languages and syntactic realizations.

In a typical seclause, a predicate denotes an event, action, or relation, and a set of arguments or thematic roles attaches to that predicate. For example, the sentence The cat chased the mouse can be represented as a seclause such as chase(agent=cat, patient=mouse). Seclauses may also include additional arguments for time, manner, or modality, producing forms like chase(agent=cat, patient=mouse, time=past, manner=quickly).

Seclauses are closely related to other semantic representations such as predicate-argument structures and semantic role labeling schemas. They are used to bridge linguistic data and downstream tasks, including information extraction, machine translation, and knowledge graph construction. By abstracting away punctuation and function words, seclauses aim to reveal the core meaning of sentences in a machine-readable form.

Challenges include cross-linguistic variation in argument realization, ambiguity in role assignment, and the alignment between seclauses and surface syntax. Annotation schemes for seclauses require consistent labeling of predicates and roles, and computational systems must handle polysemy and context-dependent meaning. Seclauses remain one approach among several for representing sentence meaning in natural language processing. See also: predicate-argument structures, semantic role labeling, semantic representation.