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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3
In linguistics, both of these viewpoints are found, and linguists are continually
rede ning the boundaries of the eld, often seeking to include phenomena which are of
interest to them personally on the grounds that it would be unscienti c not to do so.
For example, the eld has gone through at least one full swing of the pendulum from (1)
depending mainly on introspective evidence as to what expressions mean and what speakers
intend by them, to (2) depending almost entirely on corpus data, more or less ignoring
meaning and mental processes (at least in Bloom eldian Structuralism), and back to(3)a
mentalist position relying largely on introspective data (at least in Generative Grammar).
If linguists are to understand each other and build on each other's work, it is important to
make explicit our decisions about what facts we seek to explain and what research methods
and types of argument we ndconvincing. Therefore, I will begin by outlining some of my
own predispositions (what Lako (1990) called \commitments") regarding the proper study
of linguistics.
I believe that it is important for linguistics to pay attention to as broad a range
of facts about language use as possible. This takes precedence for me over the aesthetic
delight of producing the minimal and hence most elegant theory. This is not to say that
there is no room in linguistics for elegant, parsimonious theories, only that I consider the
coverage of a wide range of data to be more important. For example, theoretical linguistics
has made great progress by concentrating on linguistic competence and ignoring perfor-
mance errors by virtue of the competence/performance distinction introduced by Chomsky
(1965:4); nevertheless, I believe that the study of performance errors can contribute to lin-
guists' understanding of how speakers produce utterances. Finding adequate descriptions
for the full range of phenomena and making generalizations at the proper levels of abstrac-
tion should then lead us to satisfactory explanations of the phenomena, which motivate
the patterns we nd. In some cases, we mayeven be able to predict what patterns will
occur in an area where we have not gathered data, but this is usually not possible, given
the complex interaction of di erent types of organizing principles on di erent levels.
I also believe that linguists must strive tomake their theories consistent with
results in other relevant disciplines. In this dissertation, in addition to linguistics proper, I
will also be concerned with the elds of psycholinguistics, lexicography, and natural language
processing. It should be clear that even these closely related elds have somewhat di erent
assumptions, methods, and goals, which will be discussed at appropriate points below.
While it is important not to equate linguistics with cognitive science or psychology,