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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 22
She's sad/happy/angry/nostalgic about it. :
It was a sad/happy/angry/nostalgic day. (Ostler & Atkins 1991)
food item - mass
Here's an egg./He won't eat egg. (Ostler & Atkins 1991)
Another, more complex type of relation has to do with a continuum of senses
(which Cruse (1986:72 ) calls a \sense spectrum") connected with the same lexical form,
e.g. the mouth (of a human | of a sea squirt | of a bottle | of a cave |ofariver) (an
example apparently originally from Lyons (1977:550)). This is a series of meanings such
that each \adjacent pair" are near-synonyms, but the ends of the series are quite di erent
from each other; although the relation among these senses can be considered metaphorical,
there is no sudden leap from one domain to another, but rather a series of small steps that
are hard to di erentiate.
In all ve of the above examples of relations, the LUs involved are of the same
syntactic type and have the same valences. Many authors have also discussed other reg-
ularities which involve di erentsyntactic types and di erent valences, as well as semantic
di erences; I will call these alternations.
Cruse gives examples (p.80) of three alternations, Causative/Inchoative (Jmoved
the rock./The rock moved.), Count/Mass (Have some apple./Have an apple.), and Put them
in a can./Can them., which we could call \Cognate Container"; the last example shows that
LUs of di erent syntactic categories can be part of the same lexeme, in Cruse's terminology.
These types of regular relations have been studied extensively by various scholars,
e.g. recently for English verbs by Levin (1993), who has produced an extensive classi cation
of English verbs on the basis of such alternations. The work of Pustejovsky (1995) on the
qualia structure of nouns is also relevant, although he uses a particularly rigid system of
relating di erent aspects of nouns together, based on an Aristotelian world view, and the
system seems to be more suitable for arti cial kinds than natural ones. On a wider scale,
we can think of Sweetser's (1990) workontheevolution of verbs of knowing from verbs of
perception, particularly seeing. Although she is looking at it from a historical perspective,
there are quite real synchronic relations which result in systematic polysemy between these
semantic domains.
There are many cases in which a noun and a verb both belong to the same semantic
frame. In English, it is fairly common for some of the word forms to be identical; i.e. the