Mental Space Elements of Vietnamese and English Perception Verbs

Abstract

Perception is the procedure by which we interpret information about the environment that surrounds us. We can also say that perception is the gate to cognition. The perception process gives feedback about others and us. It is not always based on true picture of reality and we behave as though our perceptions are real. There are three key attributes to perception. The first is raw data. That is the information we experience. The second is the mental process, which is unseen but affected by things. The third is the product or that is our perception, sensing, or interpretation of our experience. In this article, we examine part of the second, the mental space elements of the perception verbs, Vietnamese and English in contrast. We inspected and collected 3,946 sentences with perception verbs as research data from two sets of English-Vietnamese, Vietnamese-English bilingual novels: The adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Love after war. We then used classify, statistic, descriptive, analysis, and contrastive methods to examine the research data. The results we have achieved for this research question are as followed. Basic mental space elements of the perception verbs include tangible and intangible factors. Tangible factors are preceptor/perceiver/experience/agent, perceived/stimulus, and perception organs. Intangible factors include spatial elements, ontological elements and information elements. Spatial elements are location, distance, path, direction, definition, layer, planning. Ontological elements are volition (volitional and non-volitional), way of cognition, sentient ability, culture, knowledge, ethnicity, geographic location, and way of thinking. Information elements are viewpoint and target.