Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

Preface
From an early age, children enjoy jokes and riddles that play on language: What
has eyes but cannot see? A potato. An air conditioner can run all day and still not go
anywhere. As in many other elds, many of the simplest questions about language can lead
to profound insights. Why does the word tongue sometimes mean `language'? Why does
heart mean both `internal organ' and `courage or compassion'? Why dowesay \I see what
you mean" when there's nothing to look at?
This thesis is about some of those \simple" questions. How can we tellhowmany
senses a word has? If a word has more than one sense, how can they be related to each
other? We will examine the general problem of polysemy (Greek for `many meanings') as
exempli ed in a thorough case study of the semantics of the English verb see. Avariety of
approaches will be used to study the question of what senses see can have and how they
are related to each other.
I will not deal with the historical evolution of the senses of see except insofar as they
are relevant to understanding the relations among the senses in the minds of contemporary
adult speakers of English. In general, if current speakers believe that one sense of a word
is older than another, then they may also tend to regard it as more central or basic. For
example, people who are aware that the English word republic derives from Latin res publica,
meaning `public a airs', mayhave a di erent concept of what it means to say that the United
States is a republic than people who are not aware of this fact. There is reason to believe
that the types of meaning change found through history are likely to be similar to those
involved in contemporary processes of meaning extension, such as metaphor and metonymy,
but this thesis does not attempt a full survey of these types of meaning shift.
Nor will I examine the childhood acquisition of the senses in detail, although I
will make occasional reference to the extensive research being done on questions of lexical
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