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

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 36
between expressions. Of course, speakers will vary greatly in their awareness of the true
etymology of words they use.
The other use of records of historical change is as a collection of documented
examples of meaning shifts over which generalizations can be made. We presume that the
kinds of meaning shifts which individual speakers creatively produce are likely to be similar
to those that have been common throughout history. Consider the processes that produce
some of the vocabulary associated with cultural innovations e.g. metaphorical extensions
such asdrive acar,kill a (computer) process, click on an icon with a mouse. Each coining
or sense extension is a speci c response to a speci c set of circumstances, but mechanisms
such as metaphorical extension are unlikely to have changed over recorded history. This
presumes that such linguistic mechanisms are stable, probably by virtue of being special
cases of general cognitive processes which themselves change on an evolutionary time scale
rather than a merely cultural one.
There seem to be, however, cultural or linguistic preferences for one innovative
mechanism over another; for example, some languages, such as English, coin or borrow
words and expressions rather freely, while others, such as Chinese, tend to compose new
words from existing morphemes. We might also note that (apparently in all languages)
the use of novel extensions with no overt marking (metaphors) alternates with the use of
overt comparisons (e.g. similes) (He's a pig vs. He eats like a pig); one or the other may
be preferred depending upon the language, register, milieu, etc. Careful historical research
might nd that an new meaning passed through a stage of being a common simile before
being acceptable as a metaphorical extension in one language, while in another language
the metaphorical extension came into being directly.
1.6 The Polysemy ofSee
It should by now not seem surprising that linguists disagree even about the idea
that the word see is polysemous. On one extreme, radical monosemists would claim that
the word has only one sense, and that the apparent di erences found in di erent sentences
are the result of interaction with elements of the linguistic and extra-linguistic context (as
in Ruhl's (1989) treatment of the verbs bear, hit, kick, and slap; see also Bouchard 1995).
At the other extreme, some recent approaches (e.g. Sinclair forthcoming) would attribute
meaning only to words used in a context and claim that it is impossible to discuss the