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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 33
on the other hand, it is an extremely \unnatural" setting for language use, and often makes
people nervous, so that the normal use of language is very di cult. Setting up a psycholin-
guistic experiment tovary only one factor of interest without varying other related factors
can be exceedingly di cult.
Consultation, either in-person with experts or indirectly by the use of references
(including dictionaries and thesauri, both printed and automated) is of course indispensable.
Even if one is convinced that much of what is in a dictionary is misleading or even wrong
with regard to the semantic structure of a lexeme, it can still be invaluable for purposes
such as suggesting rare or archaic senses of a word that would otherwise not come to mind,
o ering synonyms (and distinguishing among them), providing examples of use and giving
etymologies.
This method of data collection is one of the few that does not lend itself to statis-
tical analysis. In the rst place, there are usually only a few possible sources of information
available, so that, e.g. one would not necessarily come to believe something more because
one more reference book listed it. In the second place, the value of this kind of evidence is
based on the reputation of its source; one may know, for example, what book is generally
acknowledged to be the \best" source for the meaning of Indo-European roots, and not
bother to consult any others.
Table 1.4 on the following page lists some of the more common types of data that
can be collected for semantic research, together with their classes, i.e. nominal, ordinal,
interval, or ratio.
Some Major Types of Evidence and Their Uses in Lexical Semantics
Time does not permit a full discussion of the following studies, but they are in-
dicative of what seems to be the increasing use of more varied sources of data in linguistics:
Corpus Evidence The FrameNet Project will be a major application of Frame Semantic
principles to corpus data.
Psycholinguistic Evidence Some examples include Coleman & Kay 1981, Sandra &
Rice 1995, Jorgensen 1990, Gibbs 1980 and 1990 (studies of idiom processing), and
(Williams 1992), a study which demonstrates the prototype e ect between senses of
polysemous adjectives