The FrameNet approach to text semantic annotation can be a reliable model to make the linguistic information and semantic content of legal texts explicit. This hypothesis is discussed and empirically demonstrated through a trial of annotating a corpus of Italian legal texts. This study aims to show that FrameNet is particularly appropriate to provide new perspectives for legal language studies and for legal knowledge representation tasks. Moreover, by relying on the output of a statistical dependency parser, the FrameNet-based annotation methodology presented here can be used successfully in the automatic semantic processing of legal texts.
