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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 27
(12) a. Was her car crawling?
b. Yes, it was in rst gear.
c. No, it was rolling on wheels.
(13) a. A: Were the ants crawling?
b. B: Yes, they were walking on the table.
c. B': ?No, they were walking up the wall.
Thus it seems that we have another instance of a gurative extension (slow move-
ment of tra c) from one of the literal senses (probably the injured man, although someone
who had never had a baby might wrongly suppose that they crawl slowly, also). `Grovel'
must come from the injured person (or possibly the baby), since the ants are in their normal
body posture. These cases of extension from a single sense of a lexeme to a metaphorical
sense are parallel to that mentioned by Taylor (1995) of John got round his mother as an
extension of one sense of spatial motion round, `get round an obstacle'.
1.5 Other Types of Evidence for Lexical Semantics
The divisions among academic disciplines have traditionally had to do not only
with di erences in content but also di erences in what counts as evidence and howitistobe
gathered; indeed di erences in methodology may be more important in separating disciplines
than di erences in content, as in the case of certain overlapping areas of anthropology and
sociology. Schools and movements within linguistics, likewise, have often dealt with the same
problems but reached quite di erent conclusions because they appealed to di erent types
of evidence and used di erent types of argumentation. For example, one of the hallmarks
of the transition in America from Structuralism to Generative Grammar was the virtual
abandonment of the study of texts in favor of constructing examples and making intricate
arguments on the basis of their grammaticality, even though both schools were grappling
with many of the same problems about how to delimit morphological and syntactic units
and how tocharacterize their relations to each other.
The rst section of this chapter appealed in general terms for the use of a wider
range of evidence and a greater variety ofresearch method in linguistics; this section will
describe in more detail what is being suggested. I will rst discuss the range of types of
data and data collection methods, and then focus on speci c studies and what value they