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

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CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 227<br />

5.8 Conclusions<br />

In summary, there seems to be a tendency across historically unrelated languages<br />

for verbs meaning `see' to be used also to mean (a) `visit', (b) something like `underst<strong>and</strong>',<br />

<strong>and</strong> (c) ` nd out'. This might be related to a natural tendency for events involving these<br />

concepts to co-occur. On the other h<strong>and</strong>, the fact that the pattern of translations in<br />

Spanish resembles English more closely than the patterns of Chinese <strong>and</strong> Japanese suggests<br />

that these relations among senses may be stronger among Indo-European languages, <strong>and</strong><br />

therefore, inherited rather than universal. In any case, it is di cult to generalize on the<br />

basis of a small amount of evidence from just four languages.<br />

Possible Alternative Organizations for Dictionary Entries<br />

As wehave noted with regard to several of the dictionaries discussed in this chapter,<br />

many of the examples given for intransitive uses are in fact semantically identical to those<br />

given for transitive uses; the di erence has to do with the pragmatics of the situation <strong>and</strong><br />

whether the direct object can be null instantiated. Many dictionary entries could be made<br />

much clearer by eliminating the transitive/intransitive distinction, provided that the readers<br />

underst<strong>and</strong> something about null instantiation.<br />

We have also pointed out several cases where what are, properly speaking, collo-<br />

cations appear as part of the regular entry, <strong>and</strong> vice versa. 6 Maintaining the distinction<br />

between these two might be easier if the listing of collocations indicated which of the regu-<br />

lar senses was involved in each collocation. In fact, particularly in learners dictionaries, it<br />

would be very helpful if lexicographers could indicate by means of some compact notation<br />

which senses are extensions of, elaborations of, or otherwise derived from other senses. If<br />

the senses are numbered, this need not occupy very much space. For example, to show<br />

that sense 7 is derived (in some way) from sense 5, one could simply write (

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