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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 109
The seer must be a phonetically reduced form of you, theseen is a situation.
Also, the phrase y'see is intonationally marked as an interjection, usually with a relatively
high, level pitch ifsentence initial; this is re ected in writing by setting it o with commas,
although the reduced form of you is often not shown in writing, as in Ex. (68-d).
2.7 Some Recalcitrant Data
In the exposition of the senses and uses above, I have naturally tried to select clear
examples from the corpora where possible. But not all of the sentences in the corpus are
easy to classify, even given the extensive listofsenseswehave already discussed; here are
a few problematic cases.
(69) Brown: Not until the words had been spoken did Abel suddenly see the old house
and the insistent sea, and feel his contrition blotted out in one shameful moment
of covetousness.
This sentence is ambiguous between eye and envision, because it is out of context;
if wewere to see even few sentences of context, the ambiguity could undoubtedly be resolved.
No other senses are plausible, so the situation is one of simple ambiguity.
(70) Brown: This last was probably not in Brumidi's palette, but was needed to take
the chill, bluish look o the new work next to the old, where softening e ects of
time were seen, even after thorough cleaning.
This example represents a more subtle problem; as in many other real-world examples,
the author has blended physical perception and inference based upon it. This is a natural
re ection of cognition; we arevery often conscious only of our conclusions, not of the
evidence that leads up to them. Very likely the rst impression of the people looking at the
paintings was simply that the new work and the old were clearly distinguishable by sight;
the only part that is directly perceptual is that the new work is bluer than the old. The
\chill" of the new work and the \softness" of the old work (and the idea that the latter is
due to the passage of time) are all the results of inference.
A striking example of our unconsciousness of what goes on in visual processing and
related inference is the recognition of faces, for which humans have a specially developed