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

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CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 223<br />

Table 5.10 on the following page shows the distribution of translations for the<br />

Far Eastern English Chinese dictionary. We run immediately into the question of which<br />

morpheme we mean. The resultative compound kanjian (lit. `look-see') is found only in<br />

the sense eye 5 , but many of the other senses have either kan or jian. determine (301-<br />

c), emphasizing agentiveness has kan, while visit (301-e) has jian in various combinations<br />

(note that various more formal words are given as de nitions, but the rst two examples<br />

give more common words for this sense jianmian) `see face', <strong>and</strong> ji<strong>and</strong>ao `see reach'. The<br />

consult example (301-e-v) uses the more agentive kan, but the phrase zhao y sheng kankan<br />

`seek doctor look look' is actually ambiguous as to who is the agent ofkan. faculty is<br />

expressed by the combinations k<strong>and</strong>ejian <strong>and</strong> kanbujian, the usual resultative compound<br />

combined with de <strong>and</strong> bu for positive <strong>and</strong> negative ability.<br />

Again we nd the concept of `viewpoint' translated with morphemes related to<br />

vision, either as a noun kanfa `look way' or gu<strong>and</strong>ian `view point' or as an idiom wo kan. . .<br />

`I look' ! `as I see it,. . . '. Note also that tour gets a separate sub-entry; the compound<br />

canguan `participate view' is speci c to this sense, although it contains the morpheme guan<br />

`see' (cf. Section (357) on page 197). Even if we include all of the combinations containing<br />

either of the morphemes jian <strong>and</strong> kan as examples of verbs of perception, we still nd that<br />

only half of the example sentences are expressed by averb of perception. We have only38<br />

examples here, but it appears that the distribution of the Chinese verbs jian <strong>and</strong> kan is<br />

somewhat more limited than that of English see.<br />

5 This is only true of four of the ve examples translated with kanjian; one example under the rst sense<br />

division, I saw that the box was empty is translated kanjian, but this is actually recognize, although the<br />

fact recognized <strong>and</strong> the percept that leads to the recognition are quite physical.

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