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

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 55
Co-occurrence of Complement Patterns with Senses
As an introduction to considering the relation between the semantics of the senses
of see and the syntax of the various types of complements, we should discuss brie y the
broader question of the relation between syntax and semantics. Strictly speaking, predict-
ing all of syntax from semantics or all of semantics from syntax is impossible; each sub eld
has its own raison d'^etre. Many linguists, however, tend to regard one of these two sub elds
as more important, basic, or interesting than the other, so they may have a tendency to
de ne the domain of the \more important" sub eld more inclusively, at the expense of the
\less important".
In the recent history of linguistics, Chomsky 1957 (which marks what Wasow
(1985) calls the rst phase of the Chomskian revolution) represents a high-water mark of
syntax:
Grammar is best formulated as a self-contained study independent ofsemantics.
I particular, the notion of grammaticalness cannot be identi ed with meaningfulness
. . .
. . . one result of the formal study of grammatical structure is that a syntactic
framework is brought to light which can support semantic analysis. Description
of meaning can pro tably refer to this underlying syntactic framework, although
systematic semantic considerations are apparently not helpful in determining it
in the rst place. (1957:106,108)
Since that time, there has been a steady movement invarious schools of linguistics
toward increased emphasis on the lexicon, with more and more semantic marking in the
lexicon 5 , and the gradual ascendance of the view that the structure of a phrase is largely
the result of projection from its head lexeme. As Wasow (1985:203) puts it, \Much of what
was stipulated in grammars of earlier theories is taken to be a function of lexical semantics."
(For the history of the most radical movement toward semantics-based syntax, Generative
Semantics, see Lako 1989 and Harris 1993.)
Verb phrases present the most prominent and clear-cut examples of the projection
of the properties of the lexical head onto the larger syntactic structure, and linguists have
long noted that the syntax of argument structure seems to be related to the semantics of the
verbs involved. Levin (1993) is the most ambitious recent work on the argument structure
of English verbs and contains extensive references to earlier, more speci c studies. Levin
5 It is striking that Chomsky 1965 introduces features such as animate and human as part of the
lexicon, but insists on calling them syntactic rather than semantic features.