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

acquisition. Aside from needing to limit the scope of the study, there is also no guarantee
that the patterns of childhood acquisition and the structure of adult lexical semantics are
very closely related; the nature of that relation would be a fascinating study in itself.
Outline of the Structure of the Dissertation
Chapter 1. Introduction
The rst section outlines the research questions addressed in the thesis. These
questions, of course, are all applicable to any apparently polysemous word. I consider the
possibility that we might be able to treat all the uses of see as instances of a single, highly
abstract sense, along the lines of Ruhl (1989). I show that such a solution not only fails to
distinguish adequately among related words, but also contradicts psycholinguistic studies
of priming e ects.
I discuss my pre-theoretical biases and assumptions about linguistics in general,
the types of data that it should seek to explain, what constitutes an adequate explanation
of a set of facts, etc. Brie y, Ibelieve that linguistic theories should strive tocover as
broad as range of facts as possible; this calls for a very rich, expressive representation of
linguistic structures. The chapter also discusses a variety of sources of evidence that can
usefully bear on questions of lexical semantics, including traditional tests for ambiguity,
corpus data, psycholinguistic data, and cross-linguistic data.
Chapter 2. A Frame Semantic Analysis
In this chapter, I rst discuss the syntax and semantics of see and try to apply
some of the traditional tests for sense di erences. Then, I lay out a ne-grained breakdown
of senses and uses according to a Frame Semantic approach, dividing them into basic senses,
compositional uses, collocations and semi-collocations.
Chapter 3. Other Cognitive Approaches
This chapter provides an account of some of the senses of see based on Fauconnier's
(1985 [1994]) mental spaces, which provide a satisfactory way to talk about the similarities
and di erences in the conceptualization of what is seen, and thus to di erentiate certain
senses; however, not all senses can be handled in this way. Also included are a discussion
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