Perception Verbs Research Articles

Direkte versus indirekte Wahrnehmung: eine Fallstudie über spüren

The German perception verb spüren („feel“), patterning with other perception verbs such as sehen („see“) or hören („hear“), exhibits various kinds of complement type to be selected. In this paper, I exploit a type-based compositional semantics in Asher (2

Clausal complements of non-agentive visual perception verbs in Bulgarian and Russian

Clausal complements of non-agentive visual perception verbs in Bulgarian and Russian

Features of the visual perception process: lexicographic aspect

This paper delves into the phenomenon of perception and the importance of analyzing a person’s interaction with the world. The study focuses on the visual perception as the primary channel for obtaining information. The objective is to identify the characteristics of visual perception, as verbalized through lexical and phraseological units in the Russian language. The researcher has analyzed 118 lexical and phraseological units that nominate visual perception. By examining dictionary entries of perceptual verbs and phraseological units, she has formed synonymous rows that share a common concretizing seme, which names the features of the process of visual perception. Certain verbs are included in multiple synonymous rows, their polysemy result in the actualization of several features. This can cause the boundaries within the field to become blurred. The core position is characterized by the feature of purposefulness, which refers to the subject’s orientation towards the object of perception. The closest feature to the core is effectiveness, which signifies the end of the process with a positive or negative result. Duration is associated with effectiveness and implies fixation on the object of perception for a certain period. The next feature is assessment, which expresses the subject’s attitude towards the object. Finally, on the periphery, there is unreality of visual perception, where the image is based on existing experience rather than the real object. This language model effectively represents the features of visual perception, making it accessible, informative, and complete.

Bosnian Translation Equivalents of English Constructions with Permissive Subjects / Bosanski prijevodni ekvivalenti engleskih konstrukcija s permisivnim subjektima

Even though a verb can assign a variety of thematic roles to the subject, the most typical role for a subject is that of an agent or that of an experiencer for verbs of perception and mental inference. In this paper, we describe constructions where verbs that typically select agent or experiencer subjects occur with subjects expressing thematic roles typical of adverbials: instrument, time or place. We refer to those subjects as permissive subjects. On the other hand, it is argued that in South Slavic languages, non-agents (and non-experiencers) do not show such a strong tendency to occur in the subject position. We performed a translation task to answer the following research question: What range of structures occur in Bosnian translation equivalents of the following English constructions with permissive subjects: Period sees, Money buys, Object seats number, Object sleeps number, Book/ Album/Record sells copies? The quantitative analysis showed that some of the most frequent translation strategies include the following: middle constructions, passive constructions and constructions where the English permissive subject becomes an adverbial in the Bosnian translation equivalent. Moreover, translation equivalents where the English permissive subject is translated as a Bosnian non-agentive/ permissive subject are rather frequent too. Nevertheless, our qualitative analysis shows that the choice of a translation equivalent for the target construction depends on the English target construction itself. For example, in the case of some combinations, we show a correlation between the thematic meaning of a particular permissive subject in English and the choice of a translation equivalent.

СЕМАНТИЧНИ РАЗШИРЕНИЯ НА ГЛАГОЛИТЕ ЗА ВЪЗПРИЯТИЕ В АНГЛИЙСКИ И БЪЛГАРСКИ ЕЗИК ОТ КОГНИТИВНА ГЛЕДНА ТОЧКА

The study discusses the different extensions in the semantic field of visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory perception verbs in English and Bulgarian within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The analysis outlines 41 patterns and a wide range of lexical meanings, realized within a given patternwith emphasis on how contextual meanings appear. The research aims to present a new approach to analyzing lexical items, by paying special attention to verbs denoting passive perception in particular.

Étude des prédicats nominaux dans le lexique de la perception visuelle

In this paper, I analyse the noun forms derived from the prototypical verbs of visual perception, see and look. The descriptors used to process verbal polysemy must prepare the correspondence between verb classes and noun classes. This involves indicating whether perception verbs have nouns as associated forms. I also show that if the predicates and arguments are fundamental for the interpretation of the sentence, the actualizers are fundamental for its grammaticalization. The actualization will condition the reading of the nominal predicate. I show how this actualization will allow us to elaborate classes of predicates and thus to renew the approaches of polysemy.

Verbs That Express Passive Hearing in Catalan and French: Semantic Change of the Forms sentir (Catalan) and entendre (French)

This paper aims to study the meanings of passive auditory perception verbs in Catalan (sentir) and French (entendre) with regards to diachronic semantic change and from the point of view of cognitive semantics. These verbs do not originally encode the meaning related to perception, at least not historically. By taking examples drawn from diachronic and synchronic lexicographical sources, I have analyzed the meanings conveyed by these two verbs and their metaphorical and metonymic projections from their origin to their current use. This research provides new data on semantic extensions related to verbs of perception: certain projections that are frequently related to this kind of verb do not always occur in the direction predicted by inter-linguistic studies. Particularly, the study of the evolution in the French form entendre contradicts the expectations that can be drawn from other studies of verbs on this conceptional domain in that it seems to have evolved in the opposite direction, i.e., from intellectual understanding to sensorial perception.

Welke aanpak voor de Nederlandse vertaling van Poolse auditieve verba sentiendi?

When translating verbs from auditory perception, the translator often limits himself to a semantic and syntactic analysis of the predicates in a sentence. However, there is also an enunciative dimension (i.e. the relationship between the speaker and the subject of auditory perception) to be taken into account. Linguists divide the verbs of auditory perception into two groups according to cognitive criteria: verbs of passive and active perception. In Polish, many auditory perception verbs have a prefi x. In this article, we analyse how Polish passive auditory perception verbs and active auditory perception verbs are to be translated into Dutch.

Reportive evidentiality. A perception-based complement approach to digital discourse in Spanish and English

The present study builds on the evidential overtones of the main verbs of physical perception (visual) ver and see taking decir and say-reportive complements retrieved from a self-compiled Google corpus in Spanish and English. This opens up for research the possibility of a verdecir and seesay evidentiality in Spanish and English digital discourse. The analysis of the results confirms that the main verbs of direct vision ver and see take evidential values and provide justificatory support to the reported and quoted information provided by the decir and say post-complements based on the characteristics of the visual sources of knowledge, the meanings taken by the main perception verbs and the verbs of saying, and their complementation patterns of evidential perception.

From visual perception to inferential evidentiality1

Many languages use verbs of perception to express evidentiality. This paper studies the evidential use of the object-oriented perception verb eruitzien ‘look’ in Dutch. The results of a Twitter corpus study show that, whereas ziet eruit alsof ‘looks as if’ occasionally comes with an evidential interpretation, the construction ziet ernaar uit ‘looks like’ predominantly expresses inferential evidentiality. A diachronic investigation shows how the evidential reading of this construction developed from the object-oriented use of the verb, through a stage in which the construction is used to mark a prediction. This predictive reading, which is still available in present-day Dutch, is not evidential. It does not indicate a speaker has supporting evidence for a factual claim, but rather they have evidence for something they expect to become a fact in the near future. Our diachronic study also reveals how another construction, with a subject-oriented verb (eruit) zien ‘see (from it)’, once used to be an expression of inferential evidentiality as well. This particular construction appears to have lost the competition to its object-oriented counterpart ziet ernaar uit ‘looks like’, as it is no longer attested. We argue that the construction ziet ernaar uit ‘looks like’ has fully developed into an evidential construction, since its current primary function is to express evidentiality.

Глаголы зрительного восприятия в татарском языке (семантико-словообразовательный аспект)

The article deals with the visual perception verbs of the Tatar language, which have a number of features both in semantic and structural aspects. The aim of the study is to identify the semantic and word-formation specifics of visual perception verbs functioning in a fiction text. The scientific novelty is due to the fact that for the first time in the Tatar linguistics, a detailed classification of these verbs is given with a definition of their word-formation capabilities. The results obtained have shown that these verbs within the two thematic groups have a rather high word-formation potential. The most frequent word-formation methods are conversion and various types of compounding.

From a Lexical Verb to a Pragmatic Marker: The Case of the French falloir ‘have to/must’

The paper seeks to present a semantico-functional analysis of the French verb falloir. The empirical data are obtained from a parallel corpus – the Corpus Parallèle de Textes Littéraires (CTLFR-LT), which is composed of French literary texts and their translations into Lithuanian. The paper uses quantitative, qualitative and comparative methods. It is based on the studies focusing on the polysemy of modal verbs (Chu 2010; Dendale 1994; Kronning 1988; Le Querler 2001; Rossari 2012) as well as on the development of discourse markers in language (Dostie 2004; Vold 2008).
 The findings show that the verb falloir, while maintaining its core meaning of necessity, can express conjecture. When it is used in patterns together with verbs of saying (verba cogitandi and dicendi) and verbs of visual perception, falloir no longer functions as a marker of necessity and becomes a pragmatic marker of connection and argumentation.
 The analysis of the translations of the French verb falloir into a typologically different language, Lithuanian, has also confirmed the entrenched use of the verb in question in the modal field of necessity and its rich functional potential in the French literary texts. The paper contributes to the existing contrastive studies between the French and Lithuanian languages, which are not numerous. The findings of the research could serve didactic purposes as well as add to the field of translation studies.

Lexico-Semantic Paradigm of Perception Verbs

Abstract: The main element of the language is the word and its lexical meaning, the system lexical meaning - this information is a complex structure closely related to the problem of the sign: its semantics, pragmatics, syntactic. The content side of the language does not copy the external substrate, but expresses it in a specifically refracted system of lexico-semantic objects, it (the content side of the language) correlates primarily with perceptual information that underlies human cognitive activity, where this topic comes into contact with cognitive linguistics, the purpose of which is to identify ways of thinking about the world and compose “the picture” of its reflection in the language, what is commonly called the “linguistic picture of the world”. Keywords: linguistic meanings, semantic, functional-syntactic, formal-grammatical, derivational.

From visual perception to comprehension: Variations in construal and gaze behavior

The study explores the construal shifts from VISUAL PERCEPTION to COMPREHENSION image schemas (Grady, 2005) which the readers may face when they deal with the contexts employing the verb of visual perception видеть (see) in the Russian language. The aim of the study is to find out how different image schema types affect the readers’ gaze behavior and default interpretation. It develops a two-stage procedure which involves the corpus-based semantic analysis followed by the oculographic experiment and participants’ reports. The corpus-based search and semantic annotation help define a range of linguistic attractors (Gibbs, 2006) contingent on the image schema types of visual perception and comprehension with the latter exhibiting a more abstract character (Grady, 2005). To proceed, we appeal to the morphological, lexical, and syntactic attractors of the verbs of perception and abstract semantics outlined in (Kustova, 2004; Baicchi & Digonne, 2018; Béligon et al., 2019) and apply them for further samples annotation and contingency analysis. The typical attractors for VISUAL PERCEPTION image schema involve the verb in the perfective, visual semantics in pre-position, direct object in post-position, negation marker, animated direct object in post-position; whereas the COMPREHENSION image schema attractors are scarce and are restricted to attributes of evaluation in pre-position and several adverb types. The oculographic experiment tests the effects of perceptual construal priming and the construal entrenchment on gaze behavior and default interpretation. The experiment did not reveal significant schema type contingency on interpretation, however in terms of gaze behavior COMPREHENSION image schema was more demanding.

EFL Students’ Use of the Verb ‘See’: A Conceptual Metaphor Analysis

This study investigated Indonesian EFL university students’ use of conceptual metaphor with the English perception verb ‘see’. The idea of a conceptual metaphor refers to how people understand someone's idea represented by linguistics elements. The use of perception verbs in everyday life combined with other words that do not correlate with the five senses can inform readers of the state of language use in certain contexts. The methods employed in this research were descriptive and qualitative. The data were collected from the essays of Indonesian EFL university students (n = 27 students and 390 essays) and were processed and analyzed using AntFileConverter and AntConc concordance software. The researchers classified the perception verb ‘see’ based on its form, structure and meaning, and analyzed the conceptual metaphors. Five concepts of metaphors were found for the English perception verb ‘see’, including impression, fantasy, understanding, assumption, and prediction. 
 Keywords: conceptual metaphors, source domain, target domain, English perception verb, verb ‘see’

Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish

The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).

Лингвокультурная специфика репрезентирования телесности (на примере русского и английского юмористического дискурса)

The article focuses on exploring the specific features of body representation in Russian and English jokes. The purpose of the study was to identify linguocultural features of body representation in humorous discourse through analysing the meanings of the lexical unit body, which verbalizes the concept of body in the Russian and English languages. The lexico-semantic, conceptual and interpretative analyses revealed that this concept is represented in the linguistic worldviews of Russian and English linguocultures through common obligatory conceptual signs, such as materiality/tactility, integrity/ partibility and aliveness/deadness. It was established that the obligatory semantic (conceptual) sign of tactility is represented by verbs of perception and is common for both linguocultures, thus eliminating ambiguity in interpretation of jokes. The conceptual sign of integrity/partibility is expressed in the two linguocultures by nominating and redefining the functions of such body parts as the brain, face and liver in Russian linguoculture, and eyes, brain and liver in English linguoculture. The primary mean of representing the conceptual sign of integrity/partibility include metaphors, phraseological units, dark humour, as well as negative and evaluative judgements, all of which often lead to translation mistakes and communication failures. The semantic sign of aliveness/deadness is represented differently in the studied linguocultures. This can be accounted for by the fact that its linguoculture-specific representation mainly depends on contextual connotations and on the culture-specific ‘expected/unexpected’ effect, which is characteristic of humorous discourse.

Implementation of Category of Evidentiality in Analytical Article of English-Language Quality Press

The ways of explication of evidentiality in analytical articles of the English-language press are investigated. 30 articles of newspapers “The Washington Post”, “The Guardian”, “The Independent” for 2021 are analyzed. The classification of evidential values is presented on the basis of two indicators: the source of information and its degree of reliability. Three types of evidentiality have been identified: direct evidentiality (there is a clear indication of the source of information); impersonal evidentiality (lack of an identified source of information); author’s evidentiality (based on the author’s conclusions). The results of the study showed a significant superiority of direct evidentiality (74 %), realized through the precise indication of the source of information and the use of the author’s “we”. It was revealed that impersonal evidentiality is not typical for an analytical article (6 %). This is due to its specific characteristics: the desire for objectivity and transparency of the data provided. It is noted that this type of evidentiality is realized through adverbs, indicating an anonymous source and using collective nouns. It is shown that the author’s evidentiality is found in 20 % of cases and is realized through filler words, main sentences like that means, adverbs, impersonal sentences using verbs of perception, constructions “to be + adjective with a probability value”, modal verbs.

On the semantic-pragmatic interface of Igbo verbs of perception

This study examines some semantic-cum-pragmatic issues in realising the senses of the Igbo verbs of perception. The specific objective of the study is to find out how the gap between linguistic meaning and speaker’s meaning is filled and enriched through the context; and how the contextual features underpin what an utterance communicates using some Igbo verbs of perception. The verbs involved are hụ́(see), lé(look at), nụ́(hear), gè(listen), mètụ́(touch), nụ́(ụ̄tọ̄) (taste) and nụ́(ísì) (smell). By adopting a combination of the Cognitive Semantics approach and Neo-Griceanism, a corpus-based analysis of the Igbo verbs of perception was carried out in different contexts of usage. An audio text was transcribed, and the Antconc concordance software was used on the transcribed text for this purpose. The study’s findings indicate that the senses of Igbo verbs of perception depend significantly on some pragmatic features of the verbs’ contexts of usage. This is because the pragmatic features determine the verbs’ referents, which are established only in specific contexts. However, without the establishment of these contexts, the utterance would not make sense.

"Do You See and Hear More? A Study on Telugu Perception Verbs".

Verbs of perception describe the actual perception of some entity and it is emphasized by earlier researchers that lexicon in languages is conceptually-oriented and is necessary for our daily communicative needs. In this paper, we demonstrate and explain, which among the perception verbs have the higher frequencies of all the five senses (vision, hear, smell, taste, touch) by using a Telugu corpus and self-rating task. This study shows a greater lexical differentiation when compared to studies done using English corpus and other languages. Based on our analysis-vision, followed by hear are the most commonly used verbs in daily communicative needs by the Telugu speakers as compared to touch, taste, and smell; The inconsistency in usage of other senses are not identical to the vision and hear in other studies, it may be due to sampling and methodological variations in the corpus of different language, but in common these two senses play a key role in perception verbs. The study of Telugu perception verbs may give more interesting facts and insights into the cognitive linguistics paradigm.