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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 35
they conclude:
In some measure the present results would appear to be consistent with Fillmore's
analysis, although one could hardly claim that they reveal in any clear
way the subtleties exhibited by that analysis. This, of course, is hardly surprising,
given the necessarily coarse and crude means the subjects had to indicate
their understanding of the similarities in meaning among the 30 terms judged,
and also given that Fillmore's analysis. . . constituted a rather deep analysis of
the semantic eld, something probably not within the power of our subjects. (p.
206)
The greatest weakness of the study is undoubtedly that, since subjects were asked only the
judge similarity, they had no way of indicating that, e.g. acquit and forgive are alike in
one way and acquit and convict in another. Furthermore, like many other psycholinguistic
studies, it dealt only with single words in isolation; sentential contexts might have helped
make meanings of many words more precise, but the single-word task already took most
subjects more than an hour to complete for the 30 verbs of judging.
Historical Evidence
The diachronic/synchronic distinction, like many idealizations used in linguistics,
is in some respects an oversimpli cation. For example, an idiolect will inevitably change over
the course of an adult speaker's lifetime, mainly in response to changes in the surrounding
speech community; the most noticeable of these changes is undoubtedly the acquisition of
new vocabulary (and changes in the meanings of everyday words), but there is also likely to
be some atrophy, aswords become less common or disappear from the living language. We
may be conscious, for example, of an older speaker's continued use of the word icebox, since
it has been substantially replaced by refrigerator, but not conscious of other words which
that same speaker once used but no longer does. New words spread across populations
irregularly, over varying periods of time, in a manner quite parallel to lexical di usion of
sound change; this can be clearly seen in the case of slang and technological innovation, since
the spread is quite rapid, but similar changes occur at slower rates throughout the lexicon.
We assume that existing words similarly acquire and lose senses, becoming monosemous or
polysemous (or more polysemous or less polysemous).
Insofar as speakers are aware of the etymology of the expressions they use, records
of historical change may give us clues as to the notions speakers have about the relations