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

CHAPTER 3. OTHER COGNITIVE APPROACHES 119
also linked (dashed line (b)), representing the pre-existing knowledge of what kind of out t
cowboys wear. From this the seer deduces that the addressee has the role cowboy (dashed
line (c) in the conceptual space). (Expressions of the form see byX that Y are will be
discussed further in the following section on page 121.) There is no reason to suppose that
the seer is wrong, in fact, the rst person pronoun shows us that the seer is the speaker,
so we can con dently copy everything in the conceptual space to the base space. Note that
the term \base space" is not equivalent to \reality space"; the whole process expressed by
the sentence could be embedded in a dream, with someone dreaming of seeing a person
in an particular out t and concluding that he was a cowboy; this conclusion would still be
\true" within the dream, and therefore spread to the appropriate space.
3.3 The Semantics of Motion Expressions with See
Although it has been known to scientists for centuries that light travels from in-
candescent objects to the experiencer, either directly or by re ection, expressions of motion
connected with seeing do not always accord with this fact. On the one hand, many percep-
tion situations (both visual and other) are expressed in terms of motion from the stimulus
to the experiencer. In discussing this phenomenon, Lako (1995) gives the sentences in
Ex. (4) as examples of the metaphor perception is reception. 3
(4) a. A comet came into my sight.
b. The noise came through the walls.
c. The smell of the bay came through the fog.
On the other hand, there is also a metaphor involving motion in the opposite direction, also
applied both to vision and to other sense modalities (examples from Lako ).
(5) a. From my o ce, I can see the bay. (=Ex. (4-b) on page 43)
b. From my o ce, I can see all the way to the bay. (=Ex. (4-c) on page 43) 4
c. From my o ce, I can hear the trains.
d. From my o ce, I can smell the bay.
e. From the mountain, I can pick up broadcasts from Moscow onmy radio.
3 Ihave omitted some of Lako 's question-begging examples. Note also that it is di cult to construct
examples with the verb see and this direction of \motion".
4 In our sense divisions, this is faculty, since all the way to the bay is a path, not something seen.