Charles J. Fillmore

Case grammar, introduced in Fillmore's influential 1968 paper 'The Case for Case,' argues that the deep structure of sentences is organized around semantic roles such as Agent, Instrument, and Patient rather than purely grammatical subjects and objects. It was a major alternative to then-dominant Chomskyan syntactic theories because it placed meaning at the center of grammatical analysis.

FrameNet is a computational lexicography project at UC Berkeley that Fillmore helped launch in the late 1990s. It builds a machine-readable database of semantic frames—conceptual structures that underlie the meanings of words—and has been widely used in natural language processing research.

Fillmore spent the majority of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of linguistics. Earlier in his career, he was also affiliated with Ohio State University's linguistics department.

Frame semantics, developed after case grammar, proposes that the meaning of any word can only be understood in terms of a structured background of experience called a 'frame.' While case grammar focused on the syntactic roles of nouns, frame semantics expanded into a broader theory of how language reflects human conceptual knowledge, deeply influencing cognitive linguistics.