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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 32
Multi-lingual corpora, speci cally aligned parallel corpora are, in e ect, a
source for translations. The automatic alignment programs themselves work by nding
regular equivalences on a rough, statistical basis. The researcher can nd many more sub-
tle kinds of equivalence. Parallel corpora can be particularly helpful in lexical semantic
research, because di erent senses of a word will often be translated di erently, in essence
automatically dividing the examples into senses. Of course, one should not assume this
simplistically; the existence of a translation di erence in language B does not prove a sense
di erence in language A. For example, English put on will be translated by di erent verbs
in Japanese depending on whether the item in question is a hat, a coat, pants, belt or wrist-
watch; the motor programs involved in putting these items on are distinctive, but in the
context of English, wear should be considered general rather than ambiguous; for example,
there is no zeugma in He put on his necktie, coat, and hat. A simple de nition that will
cover all the cases is a little tricky, however; AHD has \to clothe oneself with; don" (?she
donned her watch). Of course, put on does have other senses which can lead to zeugma, as
in ?He put on his overcoat and an air of indi erence.
Cross-linguistic elicitation: Given the usefulness of translations, it is often
helpful to be able to actively elicit them rather than to merely look for them in a corpus. The
usual problems can arise when serving as one's own informant for purposes of translation,
but even when relying on others, one must be careful to elicit truly idiomatic, natural
expressions rather than word-for-word calques.
Surveys can be used to gather many types of lexico-semantic information quickly
from a large number of informants; it is common to elicit both onomasiological and sema-
siological data in the same survey, e.g. for a study of student slang, one would ask both
\What do you call a guy who is mainly interested in sports?" and for the de nition of jock.
To ensure valid data, it is helpful to have acontext that discourages frivolous answers,
although instructions may sometimes specify to give \the rst answer you think of", if too
much re ection may actually interfere with a natural answer.
A good example of the use of a survey to gather semasiological information is
Coleman & Kay 1981.
Laboratory experiments allow the collection of many kinds of data simultane-
ously, including many that cannot be collected in any otherway, such as response latency,
which can sometimes o er insights into cognitive processes. The laboratory setting can
reduce extraneous variation and allow informants to concentrate on a task for a long time;