Look and See

Look and see are semantically and syntactically related, being similar in some respects and complementary in others. Their relationship can be elucidated by reference to the underlying strings into which they are inserted. Both these verbs appear to be verbs of motion of some sort: in the underlying strings, the set of prepositions specifically used in the verb phrase of a verb of motion may be generated. The aspectual complementarity between look and see follows naturally from the fact that they require mutually disjoint subsets of this set of prepositions.