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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 53
(20) a. setting + setting:
Japan and California have both seen quite a few earthquakes recently.
b. setting + experience:
California and its residents have both seen quite a few earthquakes recently.
(21) a. news + news:
I see that the President is going to be in town tomorrow and (that) they're
going to close Main Street for the afternoon.
b. news + recognize:
I see that the President is going to be in town tomorrow andwhyyou don't
want togodowntown tomorrow afternoon.
Identity of Senses (Crossed readings)
A fourth test for sense di erences, closely related to zeugma, uses sentences in
which \VP deletion" produces gaps. Supposed we believe that there are two senses of
teacher, one meaning `male teacher' and the other `female teacher' (corresponding to those
morphologically marked in many languages with grammatical gender). Then suppose that
John has written a letter to his high school math teacher Bill Smith, and Joe has written
a letter to his math teacher Sally Jones; we still would nd nothing odd in Ex. (22). This
indicates that our supposition of two separate senses is wrong, that teacher is general,
covering both male and female, rather than ambiguous between two distinct senses.
(22) John wrote to his teacher and Joe did, too.
Now let us apply this test to see. Ex. (23) can be considered to contain two instances of
seeing, one where the experiencer was Jan, and one where the experiencer was Chris. If see
has two senses, visit and eye, either of which could be occurring here, we might expect
there to be four acceptable readings of the sentence, one for each combination of senses.
There is certainly nothing wrong with Ex. (23) in a context in which Jan and Chris both
went to visit Pat, or in a context in which both of them caught eeting glimpses of Pat. But
we nd Ex. (23) unacceptable in a situation in which Jan visited with Pat for ten minutes
and Chris only sawPat through the window of a passing train; the single word saw \resists"
interpretation as visit in the rst clause and eye in the second.