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

CHAPTER 6. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 234
categorical) knowledge of the verb lexicon. Our hypothesis is that they succeed
by playing o these two imperfect data bases against each other, seeking the
simplest t between them.
Although I am certainly not proposing a serious attempt to model the richness of rst
language acquisition, the complexity of linguistic phenomena suggests that many of these
problems can only be solved more or less as humans do, by making e cient and concurrent
use of the full range of information available.
6.2 Conclusions
In some ways, we have barely begun to answer our initial research question, \How
many senses does see have, and how are they related to each other?" But the evidence
accumulated so far does allow ustoreach certain conclusions. Although we have concen-
trated on a very small area of syntax and semantics, we have inevitably been involved in
many larger theoretical questions.
There can be little doubt that see is in fact, highly polysemous, that it is unrealistic
to postulate only one (or even a few) more general senses, with all of its uses as
being created or understood \on the y" by means of processes such as metaphor,
type coercion, etc. The psycholinguistic evidence suggests that speakers have mental
representations (or processing strategies) that are at least partially separated for at
least a dozen senses, and several of the most distinctive senseswere not even tested in
the experiment, to prevent the tasks from becoming too time-consuming. The variety
of translations for the various uses in bilingual dictionaries also leads to the same
conclusion.
More generally, although models of the lexicon which minimize the number of senses
have a certain theoretical appeal, the preponderance of evidence suggests that people
do store quite a number of relatively speci c senses for highly polysemous words.
On the other hand, the situation is very far from homonymy; most of the relations
among the senses of see are well motivated, even though particular senses are not
predictable. For example, even though the senses recognize, visit, and determine
cannot be reduced to mere uses of eye, the experiential basis of co-occurring events
relating them to eye helps explain both their likely historical development and the