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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 105
c. see at a glance
In others (which Fillmore (1996) calls decoding idioms), the collocation as a whole has
a meaning that cannot be produced by the composition of the parts, although the internal
syntax is quite ordinary, asinEx.(58).
(58) a. see a man about a dog
b. see the color of someone's money
Many, probably most, collocations are intermediate cases, in which the semantics
of the collocation is only partly compositional, so that the remainder must be regarded as
attached to the collocation as a whole, as in Ex. (59).
(59) a. so angry (drunk, etc.) one can't see straight
b. can't see the forest for the trees
c. can't see beyond one's nose
Examples of Collocations
Let us examine a few more relatively common collocations in more detail; although
of course not exhaustive, the following list is intended to be at least representative ofthe
range of collocations using see. I will not attempt to give full frame de nitions for each
of these, since they are for the most part elaborations of senses already discussed above,
with some of the arguments xed as speci c lexical items and some additional meaning
attributable to the construction as a whole. I will, however, give examples of each.
let's see
(60) a. Let's see, the jewelry will be unguarded for at least ve minutes. . .
b. Let's see, there should be another box of staples here somewhere. . .
c. BNC: `Let's see, have I got this right?
d. Brown: \Let's see," Cousin Ada said.
This means `to consider carefully'. The lexical form is xed, with no variation. This is a
\pure" pragmatic expression; no vision is involved, and no other person need be present; it
may be an extension of determine.