English Translation
I saw him sawing a tree.
Can I take it that plain “serrar” would fit equally well?
Probably, but I expect that, given seseo is used in most Spanish dialects, “aserrar” is more likely to be used, even though the context would make “cerrar” quite unlikely.
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Good point! As an incorrigible practitioner of ceceo, it didn’t occur to me.
Ceceo or distinción?
It didn’t occur to me that to most speakers of Spanish, cerrar and serrar are indistinguishable.
This one caught my eye for its leísmo. The 1st word would be Lo (or La, if the sawyer were F) in most varieties of Spanish.
This sentence cannot be found using the search facility, so I guess it’s in the “new” Fast Track. The similar “Le vi serrando un árbol” can be found though; it’s a sentence sourced from Tatoeba, and the author is from peninsular Spain.
My conjecture is that the author of this sentence took the Tatoeba sentence and modified it slightly to make it more palatable for the seseo audience, but forgot about the leísmo. 
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