This paper examines the collocational patterns of Mandarin verbs of conversation and proposes that a finer classification scheme than the flat structure of ‘frames’ [cf. Fillmore and Atkins 1992; Baker et al. 2003] is needed to capture the semantic granularity of verb types. The notion of a ‘subframe’ is introduced and utilized to explain the syntactic-semantic interdependencies among different groups of verbs
in the Conversation Frame. The paper aims to provide detailed linguistic
motivations for distinguishing subframes within a frame as a semantic anchor for further defining near-synonym sets.