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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 12
of numbers and letters for the senses, or words like hence, especially, usually, etc. orto
indicate limitations of usage, suchasarchaic, o ensive,andchie y Brit. As the experiments
of Fellbaum et al. (1998) suggest, naive users are likely to start at the rst de nition and
read down only until they nd one which seems to t, ignoring the rest of the entry.
The two ways of using the dictionary mentioned above, starting from a mean-
ing and seeking an appropriate form and starting from a form and seeking an appropri-
ate meaning are more formally known as onomasiological and semasiological, ormore
transparently, asencoding and decoding (Makkai 1966). A thesaurus is probably a better
resource for encoding, but most people have even less experience with and understanding
of thesauri than dictionaries.
1.3 Structures of the Lexicon
In this section, I try to de ne a set of terms to be used in this dissertation. In
general, I will follow Cruse (1986:Ch. 3), but with certain modi cations in the directions
of Frame Semantics and cognitive grammar. One of the most confusing terms in lexical
semantics is the word word itself; it will be avoided as much as possible.
De nitions of Terms
A word form is a particular written or spoken form, such asrunning. Alexical
form is a set of in ectionally related word forms, e.g. frun, runs, ran, runningg; itcan
also include idioms consisting of several word forms occurring in a construction, including
in ectional variants, e.g. the tail that wags/is wagging/wagged the dog. A lexical unit
(LU) is an association among (1) a lexical form, (2) a single meaning, and (3) a set of
grammatical properties, including part of speech.
Cruse (1986:77) de nes the lexical unit as \the union of a lexical form and a
single sense", i.e. equivalent to Saussure's sign, but it is clear elsewhere in the book he
considers that some syntactic information is also attached to LUs. Most of the rest of this
chapter will be devoted to discussing what \a single meaning" might mean. A lexeme is a
set of lexical units. Figure 1.1 on page 13 shows graphically the relations among the units
described above.
Lexical ambiguity can basically be de ned as the association of two distinct
senses with one word; intuitively, we feel that arriving at the meaning of an ambiguous