Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

Abstract

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as illustrating other meanings and functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction.

Transplantation of Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Retinal Tissue in the Subretinal Space of the Cat Eye

“…V ision is by far the most dominant and most important sense to all primates, including humans, with 80% or more of all sensory information being perceived by means of sight [1][2][3][4]. Loss of vision is very debilitating and costly to patients, their families, and health care [5,6].…”

Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective

“…The following sections are devoted to a discussion of such verbs from a contrastive perspective. Literal and extended meanings of visual and auditory Experiencer-based verbs have already been studied in Viberg (2008) based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (see below) and across 13 typologically diverse languages in San Roque et al (2018). See also Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013) on perception metaphors across languages.…”

Sensorial discourse and corpus in the digital humanities era: The example of the wine language

“…So, if any French, German or Spanish person would like to express complexed aromas, visualization or sounds, they will have to use basic words and to modify their meanings with other basic words like modulators (a lot, many, a few etc.) (see San Roque et al, 2018 for interesting studies of the polysemy of perceptions verbs). In recent research on wine language, it has been shown that terminology is essentially based on comparison with other items, with other previously tasted wine, with prototype (sensu Rosch, 1973Rosch, , 1975 and with modulation to adjust the term to the wills of the speaker (Bach, 2017a;Gautier & Bach, 2017).…”