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In Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976; 1982; 1985; 2006), all concepts are part of a semantic frame and are related in such a way that the activation of one lexical unit activates the entire frame. A frame is “a script-like conceptual structure that describes a particular type of situation, object, or event along with its participants and props” (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016). In its simplest form, a frame is an underlying conceptual structure into which the meanings of related terms fit. Framing experience involves activating and applying stored knowledge derived from similar contexts and situations. As a cognitive structuring device in the mind, frames are also reflected in language. They can thus be regarded as generalizations over sets of words which describe similar states of affairs, and which could even be expected to share similar sets of roles, and (to some extent) similar syntactic patterns (Baker, 2014). Frame analysis is relevant to many types of real-world scenarios and situation. One of these is romance scamming, an online deception in which a person pretends to have romantic interest in another individual with the intention of manipulating them for financial gain. As widely observed, romance scamming is a variant of the 419 advance fee scam (Levi et al., 2017), which stems from the Spanish Prisoner, a popular confidence game of the 16th century (Gillespie, 2017, pp. 217–218). Modern versions of this same deception are now conducted either partially or totally online. Since the parties involved primarily communicate through text messages, this deception is accomplished through language. The interlocuters in this scenario do not know each other (Olshtain & Treger, 2023, p. 385) and become acquainted solely through chatting. This means that contextual meaning is constructed by the addressee, based on the explicit and implicit information in the messages and the use of the right words. The decision to trust and believe in the text sender largely depends on this ‘constructed’ context, which may or may not correspond to reality. Using a fabricated identity, the fraudster strives to create the illusion of a romantic relationship between himself and the victim. In a successful deception, it 66is the fraudster’s lexical choices that cause the victim to activate the Experiencer_ focused_emotion frame in FrameNet. However, for this to occur, the Experiencer (fraudster) must convince the victim that he is in love with her and that she is the Content (object of his affection). Once she believes this, he can request money from her. In this affective relationship, which is presumably based on absolute trust, each partner has the obligation to always help each other in all situations of financial hardship. In romance scamming, the Experiencer_focused_emotion frame is thus a powerful cognitive structuring device. It is an organized package of knowledge that can easily be retrieved from long-term memory since it is already deeply embedded in Western culture and language. Since it is so deeply entrenched in our minds, the deceiver does not have to construct it. He only needs to use the right words to activate it in the victim and tap into what already exists. Using corpus methodology (Stefanowitsch, 2020), the Lexical Grammar Model (Faber & Mairal, 1999), and Dik’s (1978) stepwise lexical decomposition, we explored the linguistic means used to activate this frame. The corpus (1,045,921 tokens, and 898,377 words) was composed of 75 extended conversations between fraudsters and the author, obtained from November 2020 until April 2024. Also useful were 16 scripts provided by three ex-scammers in Nigeria, who acted as consultants on the condition of anonymity. In this study, the verbs of FEELING in the corpus, were analyzed, not only paradigmatically but also syntagmatically with an emphasis on the semantic classes of their arguments. Also meaningful was their occurrence in the fivestage process model of romance scamming in Whitty (2013ab). The WordSketch and Concordance modules of SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) were used to extract information regarding predicate-argument structure, the semantic classes of arguments, and collocates. The Thesaurus module helped to confirm the semantic relations between words. These verbs belong to the same frame not only because of their shared core meaning, but also because they take the same number and types of arguments or syntactic dependents. They not only have the same entailments, but also take the same participant’s perspective in the event. (Ruppenhofer, 2018). In romance scamming, verbs of FEELING are powerful because they are able to persuade the victim that she is really in a committed relationship with the fraudster. Using verbs such as like, love, adore, cherish, treasure, etc., the fraudsters speak of a ‘forever relationship’ and refer to the victim as their beautiful angel, beloved princess, or even darling wife, whom they will always love, cherish, and treasure for all eternity. These verbs are the core lexicon that the Experiencer uses to weave a beautiful tapestry of lies, which causes the Content to willingly enter a state of suspended disbelief, in which implausible situations are viewed as plausible.
