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

CHAPTER 6. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 233
the sentences into their native language, so that some idea could be obtained about variant
expressions for each sense.
As in the dictionary study, it is expected that some of the instances of see will be
uniformly (or nearly uniformly) translated by the basic verb for `see' in the target language.
Those uses could then be argued to constitute universal parts of human visual experience 3 ,
and hence, plausibly grouped together as one general sense or at least a few related senses,
perhaps related by event metonymy, pro ling of di erent participants, etc. Other uses,
which are lexicalized in a variety ofways, would have a better claim to be treated as
separate, less related senses.
Other Methods
In addition to those mentioned above, other research methods would be required
to investigate predictions such asthefollowing:
We would expect that core senses of see such aseye and recognize will be older
historically and more likely than peripheral senses and collocations to serve as sources
for new extensions.
We would expect that core senses would be acquired earlier and more completely than
than peripheral senses. (But note that Johnson's (1996) work on acquisition data
suggests that the earliest-acquired senses of see are more general, and the acquisition
process involves splitting larger semantic areas into ner senses, rather than adding to
a collection of distinct senses.) We would also expect the central senses to be retained
better in vocabulary loss, whether due to disuse (as in language death), senility, or
external agents (such as brain damage or drugs).
By combining syntactic and semantic information in our frame de nitions and
corpus studies, we may also in a sense be modeling the actual process of rst language
acquisition. As Naigles et al. (1993:60) have suggested,
...the child confronts the problem of acquiring a verb lexicon from two imperfect
data bases. Both situations (extra-linguistic observation) and utterances
(linguistic observation) provide only probabilistic evidence for the determination
of verb meanings. Yet we know that children acquire categorical (or close to
3 Cf. Wierzbicka's (1996) language-universal semantic primitives, which now include see (eye).