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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 40
2.2 The Seeing Frame
Let us suppose that instead of depending upon the authority of \the" dictionary as
suggested in the introduction, we examine a few hundred sentences containing the word see
and determine the senses of the word from this data. In almost half the instances, we nd
an NP representing a human being as the subject of see and an NP representing a physical
object as its direct object. As we look closely at the remainder, however, we nd that see
occurs in a somewhat bewildering variety ofsentence patterns. For example, although most
subjects of the verb are rather straightforward NPs, there is great syntactic variation in
the complements; Table 2.1 shows a fairly complete list of the patterns of complements in
clauses headed by see, except for the more speci c patterns related to collocations, which
will be dealt with in Section 2.6. (Some of these patterns may be considered equivalent to
each other by many linguists, but I am simply listing the patterns at this point.)
Complementation Pattern Example Sentence
1 none He could barely see.
2 NP She saw the table.
3 NP AP/PP He saw her rich and in love.
4 NP NP He saw her a successful entrepreneur.
5 NP V-ing They saw him running down the street.
6 NP Vbrst We never saw her be kind to her mother.
7 bare clause Alice could see the dog was lost.
8 that clause Alice saw that the keys were missing.
9 if/whether clause Iwant to see if it's stopped snowing.
10 WH-headed Indirect Let's see whether he wants to go with us.
Question
11 PP[to] I unpacked the suitcase while he saw to
dinner.
12 to it that clause Please see to it that the house is clean
when you leave.
13 NP PP[to] The butler saw the doctor to the door.
14 (passive) V-to They had been seen to take bribes.
15 NP PP[as] They see the contract as a liability.
16 PP[in] NP or NP He saw in her the beginning of a sense of
PP[in]
loyalty.
17 BE seeing NP He's seeing a girl in Des Moines every
weekend.
Table 2.1: The 17 Major Complement Syntactic Patterns (after Fillmore and Kay 1994:6.5)