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

CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 220
Cross-linguistic Comparisons of Translations
As I discussed in Section 1.2, certain groups of events tend to co-occur everywhere
in the world, and the resulting correlations in human experience form the basis of much
linguistic categorization; I further argued in Chapter 2 that such a natural tendency to
co-occur lies behind the connection between eye and recognize. Now, with translations
of separate senses in bilingual dictionaries, we can look at how the di erent senses are
lexicalized in di erent languages, and perhaps answer the question as to which relations
among senses are natural extensions based on natural co-occurrences of events which would
be true for all cultures, and which are language-speci c facts.
Unfortunately, aswehave seen, just as in the monolingual English dictionaries, the
example sentences under a sense heading in a bilingual dictionary do not necessarily belong
to that sense according to our de nition. I have therefore analyzed the material from the
bilingual dictionaries in a second way, by categorizing each of the example sentences into
one of our senses, regardless of where it appears in the entry, and creating tables showing
the translations given for each example. Such a table for the Collins Spanish dictionary is
shown in Table 5.9 on page 222; the columns represent our sense divisions, and the rows,
the various translations given in the 64 examples in this dictionary. Wehave organized the
senses into four broad categories:
1. basic vision (faculty, process, vide)
2. visiting (audience, consult, visit)
3. ensure (ensure)
4. cognitive (classify, discourse,recognize)
The remaining senses are shown in the next division of the table, and example
sentences whose meaning depends on collocations we have previously discussed or other
idioms are shown in the last division. The vertical lines in the tables show these divisions,
with the double line in the middle of the table dividing the four meaningful divisions on the
left from the arbitrary ones on the right. Insofar as possible, we have tried to to make the
same divisions according to the meanings of the translation equivalents, which are shown
in the rows of table. Those example sentences which do not contain any word or phrase