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

Chapter 5
What the Dictionaries Say
5.1 Introduction
It is important to study the semantics of see based directly on primary data,
whether in the form of introspection, corpus searching or experiments. But it would also
be foolish to ignore the e orts of professional lexicographers to de ne the word; we should
now be able to look at dictionaries and to compare them with the results of the study so
far. The rst part of this chapter discusses what English lexicography has to say about
the senses of see and the sense divisions that occur in a number of major monolingual
English dictionaries; the second part gives some comparisons between the sense divisions
in monolingual English dictionaries and those which appear in several bilingual dictionaries
(sometimes called translating dictionaries). The relevant sectionsofseveral dictionaries are
included in this chapter and discussed in detail; most of the original typography has been
preserved, but line breaks have beenintroduced and (in many cases) numbering added so
that the reader can follow the discussion more easily. Sincewe are discussing only the sense
divisions, the etymologies, pronunciation, and word forms (saw/seen/seeing) are omitted
from the entries. For the bilingual dictionaries, we use regular orthography in the case of
Spanish, and the national standard romanizations for Chinese and Japanese.
Wemust remember that, even though almost every new dictionary is compiled with
reference to many existing dictionaries, there are severe constraints on the amount of time
and e ort which professional lexicographers can spend on the writing of individual entries
for words; the writing of dictionaries (whether mono- or bilingual) is a commercial enterprise
in which time spent on lexicographic analysis is a cost and productivity is measured in terms
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