‘Seeing’ is ‘trying’: The relation of visual perception to attemptive modality in the world's languages

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the concepts of ‘seeing’ and ‘attempting/trying’ in various languages. These concepts have so far been found to be co-lexified in languages spoken in Eurasia, Papua New Guinea, India and West Africa, with an added implicature of politeness present in some languages when this lexical item is used in directives. After establishing a cross-linguistic sample, the paper proposes a specific grammaticalization mechanism as responsible for producing this semantic relationship. The explanation centers on a process involving metaphorical transfer, the loss of semantic features, generalization, and a specific syntactic context conducive to this meaning shift. First, the Mind-as-Body metaphor is applied to the mind-related notion of ‘seeing an object’ to derive the body-related notion of ‘controlling an object’, as has previously been demonstrated to be the case in the history of certain Indo-European languages. Second, semantic bleaching causes the meaning component of physical sight to be lost from the overall meaning of the morpheme, and semantic generalization allows attempted actions to be mentally treated the same as physical objects that are manipulated. Finally, the context in which this meaning shift occurs is posited as constructions involving multiverbs, such as serial verbs or converbs.

Politeness Devices in the Tuvan Language

“…Since the association of 'seeing' with 'trying' and politeness may seem somewhat unusual for readers whose mother tongue is English or Russian, it is worthwhile to make a brief excursus here to show that Tuvan is not the only language that uses an attemptive modality morpheme derived from the verb 'see' for signaling politeness in requests. This subsection discusses the co-lexification of these concepts in other languages, following Voinov (2013).…”

“…These include the Papuan languages, the Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages in India, Ewe in West Africa, and English. See Voinov (2013) for examples, as well as for the cognitive mechanism proposed as responsible for this co-lexification. Of these languages, at least English has a politeness implicature associated with using 'see' in the frame 'see if you can'.…”

Morphological fusion without syntactic fusion: The case of the “verificative” in Agul

“…40 "Attemptive modality" constructions with 'see' or 'look at' have been surveyed by Voinov (2013), who provides numerous examples from the Turkic and other Altaic languages, as well as the Papuan languages, the Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages of India, and Ewe in West Africa.…”

Verbos de percepção visual como estratégias de evidencialidade: usos de ver, olhar e observar em uma perspectiva discursivo-funcional

“…A grande versatilidade funcional dos verbos de percepção visual é atestada por diversos estudos (URBANO, 1993;ROST-SNICHELLOTO, 2009;VENDRAME, 2010;VOINOV, 2013;CARVALHO;GOMES, 2017;HATTNHER, 2018;ROBUSTE, 2018;HENGEVELD et al, 2019; entre muitos outros), os quais demonstram que, além da percepção sensorial, esses verbos podem expressar percepções mentais, posse de conhecimento, funções interacionaisdiscursivas etc. Uma das funções que desempenham -aquela que interessa a este artigo -é a de marcar lexicalmente a fonte da informação de um enunciado, o que se pode chamar de "evidencialidade lexical", nos termos de Aikhenvald (2004, p. 150).…”