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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 51
B: Yes, but only at the country club.
Here, B believes that A is asking about consulting with the doctor, and answers
with regard to both consulting and visiting; the reply could be paraphrased \I met
socially with Dr. Ramos, but I didn't consult him professionally."
The basic idea of this test is to coordinate two such clauses, one with negative
polarity and the other with positive polarity with the same verb. It is possible to get a
simple positive and a simple negative clause together, but usually hedges are added to signal
what is going on:
(12) Isaw Alice at work today, but I didn't really see her, because I was so busy.
This is most likely to be interpreted with the rst see in the sense eye and the second in
the sense visit or consult. This test can be useful in di erentiating senses that allow the
same argument structures (such aseye, visit, and consult, all of which can take a simple
NP referring to a person as a direct object).
If the arguments are of di erent semantic types for the two senses, we are dealing
with the third type of test, zeugma.
Zeugma
The basic principle of zeugma is that coordination of two arguments that require
di erent senses of the same word produces a sentence that is somehow odd, sometimes
comically so, sometimes as a literary device. Consider an example from Cruse (1986:13),
(13) Arthur and his driving license expired last Thursday.
The oddness of this sentence is due to the simultaneous use of two distinct senses of expire
(roughly `come to the end of the valid period' and `die'); syntactically similar sentences that
involve only one of these senses are not odd: 4
(14) a. Arthur and his sister both expired last year.
b. Arthur's car insurance and his driving license both expired Thursday.
4 Note that coordination of two NPs which have di erent thematic relations to the verb can produce a
similar feeling of oddness, as shown in the coordinated subjects of The logger and his chainsaw cut down the
tree. We must be careful not to confuse these two issues.