[4] Fillmore spent three years in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, where he intercepted coded Russian conversations on short-wave radio and taught himself Japanese.

[6] In 1968, he published his theory of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), which highlighted the fact that syntactic structure can be predicted by semantic participants.

This work aimed at developing a complete theory of grammar that would fully acknowledge the role of semantics right from the start, breaking with the dominant form-based approaches, while simultaneously adopting constraint-based formalisms as popular in computer science and natural language processing.

One of Fillmore's most widely noticed works of the time (with Paul Kay and Cathy O'Connor) appeared in Language in 1988 as "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone".

Fillmore served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1991 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000.

[7] His legacy continues with his many notable students, including Adele Goldberg, Laura Michaelis, Christopher Johnson, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Len Talmy, and Eve Sweetser, Barbara Dancygier and others.

In 1988, Fillmore taught classes in computational lexicography at a summer school at the University of Pisa, where he met Sue Atkins, who was conducting frame-semantic analyses from a lexicographic perspective.

Data is gathered from the British National Corpus, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by both lexical units and Frames.