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

CHAPTER 3. OTHER COGNITIVE APPROACHES 126
perception, suchasnews and classify, require not merely sentient seers, but human ones.
Because so many relations need to be represented, the diagram becomes very di cult to
read; I have therefore separated it, purely for expository purposes, into two parts. Fig. 3.9
on the next page shows such a representation for those senses involving human seers and
Fig. 3.10 on page 128 shows the senses involving other types of seers. These gures can
be interpreted as follows:
The semantic type hierarchies of the seer and the seen are shown at the left and
right of the diagram, respectively, in the trees drawn with heavy lines. The light lines show
the joins of the types, with the names of the corresponding senses written near the angles.
In two cases (envision and classify), it has been necessary to show senses as having two
possible types of seen; in this case the two alternates are marked with a dashed arc. Thus,
for both envision and classify, theseer must be human and the seen can be either an
entity oranevent; the di erence between these two depends upon the fact that envision
is marked irrealis, while classify has two non-subject arguments, one an oblique, usually
marked with as.
Note that the sense scan has only the semantics of the seer speci ed; it can take
a seen of any type. We could also directly represent the fact that all the senses of see
are related to the same set of irregular past and past participle forms; this is not shown,
however, as doing so would add another dimension to our gure and make itmuch harder
to read.
3.6 Uni cation and Re exives
The mechanism of uni cation that underlies Construction Grammar (and Frame
Semantics) is completely general; anything can unify with anything so long as there are no
con icting speci cations. This is how re exives are handled within these frameworks. For
example, in Ex. (16-a), there is a cooking frame, with Matilda as the cook, dinner as the
food, and her mother as the beneficiary; in Ex. (16-b), the same frame is involved, but
Matilda is both cook and beneficiary.
(16) a. Matilda has to cook dinner for her mother.
b. Matilda has to cook dinner for herself.
c. Matilda human has to cook dinner for herself sentient .