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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 106
see one's way clear
(61) a. I hope you will see your way clear to give ittoher.
To come to the conclusion that one can (or should) do something. This is a very xed
metaphorical extension from the experience of walking on a path and seeing the path ahead.
see fit
(62) a. Pat had it for a week before seeing t to tell me about it.
b. You can handle the situation however you see t.
c. They never saw t to visit us until we moved to Hawai'i.
d. You can sell it or hang on to it as you see t.
e. Brown: \I should . . . be honored and grati ed should the Democrats see t to
nominate me."
The seer is a conscious being, seen a to-in nitive. In the basic syntactic pattern (seer
sees t to B), the subject of the in nitive phrase is the subject of see, sowe can regard this
sense as a verb of the type exempli ed by endeavor, fail, refuse, anddare, which undergo
what has been called Subject-Equi-NP-deletion, but do not allow the alternative in which
the embedded verb has a di erent subject marked with for, asshown below:
(63)
Ms. Ding hated [for Ms. Ding] to go out with Igor.
for Natasha
saw t [for Ms. Ding]
for Natasha
The seen must involve a process, not a pure stative ( They saw t to live in Spain
for ve years). There is another common syntactic pattern with a free relative, (They can
exercise their stock option whenever they see t), which blocks the extraction.
see fit may be related to classify (i.e. see X as tting) orcondition (i.e. see
X tting, where tting functions as an AP). see fit is often used ironically, implying that
someone's actions are grudging and slowed by sel shness. Heather Jones (p.c.) has noted
that there is a similar expression in Welsh, equivalent to `please', that means literally `if
you see well'.