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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 43
about the reality or unreality of the seen; in addition to conventional unreal objects, as
in see a unicorn or see pink elephants, we nd patterns that clearly do not involve simple
visual perception, even though the objects perceived are in principle easy to see:
(3) a. I can just see her face when she opens the package.
b. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her father's face.
Ex. (3-a) removes the event from the present (via the clause which expresses futurity even
though the tense of both verbs is \simple present"!) and also adds the words can just,
which are frequent collocates of this sense 1 . Ex. (3-b) contradicts a presupposed condition
for physical vision. These senses will be discussed in more detail in Sections 2.5 and 3.2.
Another area of variation that is not represented in the table above is the relative
frequency of di erent forms of the verb. Some senses of see require or strongly prefer certain
tenses and aspects (e.g. pattern 17 in Table 2.1, used especially in the sense dating), some
lend themselves more readily to passivization or the formation of reduced relatives, etc. 2
In the remainder of this chapter, we will follow the traditional linguistic practice
of noting what syntactic and semantic combinations are required, possible or impossible,
but we will not make further mention of frequencies; this will be discussed as a topic for
future research in Section 6.1.
Finally, we also note the presence of prepositional phrases expressing sources and
goals similar to those used with motion verbs, as in Ex. (4).
(4) a. From my o ce, I can see the bay.
b. From my o ce I can see to the bay.
c. From my o ce I can see all the way to the bay.
Ex. (4-a) and Ex. (4-b) are similar in meaning 3 , and Ex. (4-c) seems to be merely a more
emphatic form of Ex. (4-b). These expressions and their origin will be discussed in detail
in Section 3.3.
1 cf. Ex. (41) for detailed discussion.
2 For some of the details, see Table B.1 on page 255.
3 For some speakers Ex. (4-b) implies that one can see things at intermediate distances as well, while
Ex. (4-a) does not.