This paper presents an analysis of six verbs, namely acquire, buy, gather, grasp, receive and seize. They are all commonly used for expressing physical acquisition, but can also be extended to describe mental acquisition, that is, a situation where something is understood, learnt, etc. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that the complexity of the frames connected with these verbs determines how easily they can be extended into the mental domain: a simple frame would thus mean that the verb is more frequently used to express mental acquisition. The data analysed is collected from the British National Corpus and the preliminary results indicate that there is a correspondence between the complexity of a verb's frame and how frequently the verb is used as a mental verb.