The semantic structure of vision verbs: A psycholinguistic investigation of Italian (original) (raw)

Verbs of vision and category violations: Why see, look and watch are difficult to define

Essays and studies Vol 62: The English Literary Society. Kyoto Women’s University., 2017

Human beings are primarily visual creatures, receiving a large proportion of our information about the world through visual sensory experience. Despite the centrality of vision in our daily lives, the ways in which the visual sense is conceived by humans is largely mysterious. The English language lexicalizes the visual sense around three core words: see, look, and watch. Despite the high frequency of these verbs in English, the different meanings of the words can be extremely difficult to tease out. English language learners who make mistakes such as 'I went to the Louvre and watched the Mona Lisa' or 'I saw out of the window' inadvertently draw attention to the complexities of these verbs. To account for the difficulties of these words this paper proposes the existence of certain binary categorization schema in human cognition, such as animate versus inanimate, dynamic versus static, internal versus external, durative versus non-durative among others. The verbs of visual perception violate these category boundaries in such ways as crossing the internal/external boundary, flipping between static and dynamic and conceiving of the same action as both durative and non-durative. These category violations are at the heart of the difficulties encountered when trying to analyze the semantics of the verbs of visual perception.

SEMANTIC EXTENSION OF VERBS OF PERCEPTION

International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (IJDL) volume 51 no 2 June, 2022

The meaning extension of verbs is unavoidable as there are only a limited number of verbs by means of which we need to express innumerable number of verbal concepts. The verbal extensions can be captured by context in which the collocations find a vital part. This paper attempts to investigate the semantic or meaning extensions of verbs by cognitive principles. Cognitive semantics offered us cognitive principles to explain the verbal extensions of meaning. Neagu (2013) analyses the meanings of perception verbs in English, Romanian and French, starting from one important tenet of cognitive linguistics. Sweetser (1990) analyses the semantic extensions of perception verbs in Indo-European languages, from a cognitive and diachronic viewpoint. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (1999), another cognitive linguist, discusses the polysemy of perception verbs synchronically from a typological point of view. Taking into account all these research works on verbs of perception, the semantic extension of verbs of perception in Tamil is carried out here.

Polish and English Verbs of Visual Perception – a Proposal of the Frame Dictionary

Beiträge der Europäischen Slavischen Linguistik. Polyslav VI, 2003

In this paper I discus the advantages of the frame semantics' approach to linguistics analysis. First I present main disadvantages of old-style dictionary and the frame theory, then I show how it can be applied to linguistics descriptions of word meaning. As the linguistics material I have chosen one English verbs of visual perceptionto gaze. The analysis of the Polish equivalents is based on the citations found in corpus of Polish language compiled by Scientific Publishing House PWN. The description of the English verbs is based on the texts collected in the British National Corpus. Finally I try to draw a conclusion what new solutions the frame semantics can bring for lexicography.

Do You ‘See’ What I ‘See’? Differentiation of Visual Action Words

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2014

found that processing time for simple visual stimuli was affected by the visual action participants had been instructed to perform on these stimuli (e.g., see, distinguish). It was concluded that these effects reflected the differences in the durations of these various visual actions, and the results were compared to participants' subjective ratings of word meaning but it was also possible that word characteristics like length might have influenced response times. The present study takes advantage of word length differences between French and English visual action words in order to address this issue. The goals of the present study were to provide evidence that (1) the processing time differences previously found were due to differences in the cognitive actions represented by these words (and not due to characteristics to the words themselves), and (2) that individuals subjectively differentiate visual action words in such a way that allows for predictable differences in behaviour. Participants differentiated 14 French visual action words along two dimensions. Four of these words were then used in the instructions for a size-discrimination task. Processing time depended on the visual action word in the instruction to the task and differed in a predictable manner according to word meaning but not word length.

Verbs of sensory perception: An English-Spanish comparison

Languages in Contrast, 2004

has pointed out the differences between Spanish and English verbs of motion with regard to the expression of elements such as "Path of motion" or "Manner of motion." Generally speaking, English verbs incorporate manner to their core meaning while Spanish verbs tend to incorporate Path, expressing Manner by means of an additional complement. Comparing English motion events and their translation into Spanish in several novels, Slobin found out that only 51% of English manner verbs were translated into Spanish manner verbs , the rest being neutralized or omitted.