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Article published In:
Perception, Culture and Language
Edited by Judit Baranyiné Kóczy and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies 10:2] 2023
► pp. 342–366

The perspective of the other

A corpus-based analysis of visual perception in Hungarian elegiac poetry

ORCID logo | Eötvös Loránd University

The central question of the paper is whether visual perception serves as a grounding cognitive act for experiencing and reflecting on the other in elegiac poetry. I assume that elegy has a cultural scheme in which the lyric subject can see the environment not only from his own point of view but also from the perspective of the other, and this mental contextualization has reoccurring linguistic patterns (e.g.,the expressions of retrospection/looking backwards, or looking to the natural environment from different points of view) in elegiac tradition. For testing the assumption, I use corpus-based analysing methods: in a quantitative analysis a specific research corpus is built from canonical Hungarian elegies, and it is analysed with Lancsbox with the aim of identifying the characteristic linguistic construction of visual perception. I explore the distribution and the collocational patterns of the Hungarian verbs lát ‘see’, néz ‘look’ and figyel ‘watch’ in the elegy corpus, and keyword analysis is made with the use of a reference corpus built from Hungarian odes.

Keywords: visual perception, elegy, cognitive poetics, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical orientation
  • 3.Material and methods
    • 3.1The process of corpus building
    • 3.2Methodology of examination
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Frequency patterns
    • 4.2Keywords
    • 4.3Qualitative analyses
    • 4.4Collocation patterns
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00104.sim
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