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

CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 176
collocations in our treatment, y'see and let's see respectively. As discussed in Chap-
ter 2, both these senses inherit the basic semantics of recognize but have very di erent
pragmatics. (13b) seems to be identical to (14b), and should be classi ed as instances of
determine.
With regard to the collocations at the end of the entry, there are no examples of
see after (15) in the BNC; it may be a blend of look after and see tooccurring in speech
but not actually lexicalized. There are 290 examples of the collocation see for (17) in the
BNC, but only seven could possibly have the meaning indicated here, and all of those are
ambiguous with other known senses. There are no examples of see the elephant (20). Given
the fact that speakers must have knowledge of vast numbers of very low frequency lexical
items, it is di cult to say in what sense these collocations exist as lexical units in the
language, shared by a speech community.
Clearly, see to(22) and see toit(23) are both instances of ensure, the latter
taking a that-clause (which can be null instantiated) as its complement, and the former
an NP, in circumstances in which the action to be performed is clear in context (e.g. in
(22), the equivalent that-clause would be something like see to it that the children receive a
good education, which mightentail intermediate actions such as registering the children in
appropriate schools, reading to them, paying their tuition, helping them with homework,
training them in the family trade, etc.). But ensure can also be expressed without the
words to it before the that-clause (cf. 5b).
In summary, we nd that the sense divisions and subdivisions in the W3NI seem to
have quite di erent statuses. One of our senses may be scattered across several dictionary
senses or one dictionary sense may include several of ours. The de nitions themselves are
often not very helpful; it would be daunting to distinguish among \to learn or nd by
observation or experience" (2b), \to nd out by investigation" (2c), and \to perceive the
meaning or importance of" (12a). Usually, the examples make clear what is intended by
the de nition, rather than the other way around. The reader can learn something from
the dictionary, but it is a highly interactive process, depending heavily on what the reader
already knows. While lexicographers must obviously depend on reader's general world
knowledge in many ways, explicitly providing information about both the semantics and
the syntax of each sense is helpful for readers from very di erent cultural backgrounds and
will be essential for dictionaries to be used in NLP.
We note that this process is very di erent forentries de ning less common words,