The work is important in two ways. First, it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning found in grammar is also operative in core vocabulary items like 'look' and 'see', and it is therefore not necessary to posit polysemy in the lexicon. The second way this work is important is its quantitative methodology. All quantitative support comes from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a massive on-line corpus produced by thousands of speakers. This has allowed us to test such predictions as the greater frequency of the collocation 'look carefully' compared to 'look carelessly', or the greater frequency of 'but look' over 'and look', or of 'appears...but' over 'looks... but', etc., etc. Such tests which provide new knowledge about the distributions of these forms would be practically impossible to carry out without such a corpus.