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

Chapter 2
A Frame Semantic Analysis
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I will introduce an analysis of the senses of see using Frame
Semantics, an approach to lexical semantics which describes lexical items in relation to
gestalts based on the speaker's experience of entire situations in which the items are used
(Fillmore 1976, 1982, and 1985, Gruber 1986, Fillmore & Atkins 1992, Fillmore 1994,
Petruck 1995, Lowe et al. 1997, Baker et al. 1998). I will discuss the especially varied
syntax of VPs headed by see, the di culty of applying some traditional tests for sense
di erences, and the event structure of seeing; I will also develop a set of senses, rst in brief
outline and then in greater detail using a new frame notation.
Most of the examples given in this chapter have been constructed speci cally to
exemplify clearly and simply the meanings and patterns under discussion; when one begins
to deal with real language use, things are rarely so simple or so short. To avoid unnecessary
multiplication of sentence patterns, we will consider mainly active forms, not passives,
although we will note certain senses that do not occur in the passive. Where possible,
corpus examples (showing the source) have also been given; some have been shortened by
omitting irrelevant material. The corpora used are the Brown corpus, a balanced million-
word corpus of American English compiled in the mid-1960s, and the British National
Corpus (BNC) a balanced 100-million word corpus compiled from 1991 to 1994.
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