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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 26
to prevent usfromusing\like x" to license Ex. (9-i) to describe a cocker spaniel bounding
down the walk to greet his master, bypicking out the horizontality and multiple-foot-contact
and ignoring the proximity to the surface? We nd ourselves asking what experience tells
us are the wrong kinds of questions|how many features do two things have to share to be
\similar"?
So we conclude that there must be polysemy, and we try to devise multiple de ni-
tions; this is also problematic. In fact, weseemtohave a good example of the kind of \family
resemblance" situation that Wierzbicka claims \never had any empirical basis" (1996:245).
That is, di erent sets of the examples share di erent sets of features (e.g. [low ], [slow ],
[multiple-feet ], [horizontal ]), and we have no justi cation for preferring a de nition
that groups them one way over one that groups them another way.
Trying the Identity tests, we produce sentences like the following:
(10) a. The ant was crawling on the sidewalk and so was the wounded man.
b. The ant was crawling on the sidewalk and so was the baby.
c. ?The ant was crawling on the road and so were the cars.
d. ??The ant was crawling on the sidewalk and so was the repentant spouse.
e. The oor of the restaurant was crawling with babies and the tables with ants.
f. The table was crawling with ants and the road with cars.
Ex. (10) d. is basically impossible with the `grovel' reading, but c. is better,
because at least the cars are physically moving. Even Ex. (10) a. and b., however, will
probably strike some speakers as zeugmatic. With regard to the other form of the alterna-
tion, both the gapped sentences (Ex. (10) e. and f.) sound zeugmatic, with e. marginally
better, probably due to the pragmatic plausibility of the scene described.
The Yes/No test gives us patterns like Ex. (11) and Ex. (12), which delimit the
literal and gurative senses prettywell, and also Ex. (13), which suggests that we do not have
two separate senses for vertical and horizontal motion, even though prototypical crawling
is clearly horizontal.
(11) a. A: Was the baby crawling?
b. B: Yes, she was on all fours.
c. B': No, she was moving right along.