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

CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 173
The rst sense (1a), corresponds to our eye, the most basic sense. The de nition
of the next sub-sense begs the question of exactly what sort of perception is meant; it is
obviously not simple vision, but is it the recognition of physical objects with the hands or
amarvelous sensitivity to social relations? Neither the example sentence nor the de nition
makes it clear. The next sub-sense, however, (1c), probably is lexicalized, our sense scan.
Although no de nition is given for the top level sense which includes all three of these
sub-senses, we note that all involve physical vision, with eyes or other systems.
No such unity can be found among the senses listed under (2). (2a) corresponds
closely to our sense experience, and (2c) corresponds to our sense determine. (2b) seems
rather similar to (3c), corresponding to our sense recognize, except that the example which
is given for (2b) is itself idiomatic (re ected in the omission of the article before the count
noun cause), perhaps related to the family of uses/senses see noreason to, see noneed to,
etc., discussed in Section 3.4 on page 121.
(2d) and (2e), at least to judge by the examples, are temporal and locative versions
respectively of our sense setting; the semantics of the temporal and the locative seem close
enough not to require separate senses. The example given in (2d) could be an example of \be
marked by", but it does not seem to t the de nition \give rise to", unless one conceives of
\glacial times" as actively fostering human evolution. There may well have been a stage in
the development ofthesetting sense in which \PLACE saw EVENT" was metonymic for
\PEOPLE in PLACE saw EVENT". But it now has an independent existence, as shown by
this example; by de nition, there were no people outside of our \ancestral stock" to witness
its triumph. Also, note that in (2e), the synonym WITNESS is itself ambiguous between
a sense like eye/process and a sense like setting, in addition to its legal senses. Such a
range of meaning seems to be language speci c; the nearest equivalents in Spanish, Chinese,
and Japanese do not have a similar range.
(3) can be considered mainly a mixture of examples of our senses envision and
recognize. (3a), (3d), and (3g) are all envision. Note that the irrealis semantics charac-
teristic of envision can be expressed in various ways, by can plus the negative, metaphor-
ically by the day when, use with the future tense (will not try), in his dreams. etc. The
choice of one out of several linguistic forms to express a given situation conveys additional
information by conversational implicature (Levinson 1983:132-147). In this case, the use
of can at all rather than nothing suggests that the ability to see something is in doubt.
Furthermore, one of the non-negated can's is clearly a rhetorical question (can you see