In this paper, I pursue the distributional hypothesis that the meaning of a word is derived from the linguistic contexts in which it occurs and apply it to verbs of perception. Differently from NLP implementations of the distributional hypothesis, I explicitly limit the range of variables to the grammatical domain and chart the way in which verbs of Vision, Hearing and Touch are used, morphologically and syntactically, in a representative sample of corpus data. Some aspects of experience are so central and pervasive that reference to them has grammaticalized (Divjak 2010; see also Janda & Lyashevskaya 2011; Newman 2008). The aim is, firstly, to determine to which extent a verb’s grammatical context alone allows us to classify utterances according to the perception type, and, secondly, to chart the similarities and differences in the verbs’ preference for morphological markers and syntactic constructions. If contexts are highly specialized, language structure, as it is witnessed in use, could assist sensory impaired speakers in building up viable representations of concepts, even if sensory experience is lacking. If, in addition, similarities between certain sensory perception verbs are high, sensory impaired speakers could use these similarities to perform analogical mapping across senses and ground concepts relating to the impaired sense in a cognate sensory experience. The findings are relevant for concept acquisition and representation in general and for concept acquisition and representation in sensory impaired populations, such as the blind, in particular.
1967Экспериментальное исследование семантики русского глагола [Eksperimental’noe issledovanie semantiki russkogo glagola]. Moskva: Nauka.
Divjak, Dagmar
2003On trying in Russian: A tentative network model for near(er) synonyms. Belgian Contributions to the 13th international congress of Slavicists, Ljubljana, 15–21 August 2003. Slavica Gandensia 301. 25–58.
Divjak, Dagmar
2006Ways of intending: Delineating and structuring near-synonyms. In Stefan Th. Gries & Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics. Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 19–56. Berlin: Mouton.
Divjak, Dagmar
2010Structuring the lexicon: A clustered model for near-synonymy. Berlin: Mouton.
Divjak, Dagmar & Stefan Th. Gries
2006Ways of trying in Russian. Clustering behavioral profiles. Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2(1). 23–60.
Harris, Zellig
1954Distributional structure. Word 10(23). 146–162.
Hofmann, Thomas
1999Probabilistic latent semantic analysis. Proceedings of the fifteenth conference on uncertainty in artificial intelligence (UAI’99).
Janda, Laura Alexis & Ol’ga Lyashevskaya
2011Grammatical profiles and the interaction of the lexicon with aspect, tense and mood in Russian. Cognitive Linguistics 22(4). 719–763.
Janda, Laura Alexis & Valery Solovyev
2009What constructional profiles reveal about synonymy: A case study of Russian words for sadness and happiness. Cognitive Linguistics 20(2). 367–393.
Karlsson, Fred
1986Frequency considerations in morphology. Zeitschrift fur Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 391. 19–28.
Landau, Barbara & Lila Gleitman
1985Language and experience. Evidence from the blind child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Landauer, Thomas K., Peter W. Foltz & Darrell Laham
1998Introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes 251. 259–284.
Levin, Beth
1993English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Li, Jianguo & Chris Brew
2008Which are the best features for automatic verb classification? In Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT. 434–442.
Louwerse, Max M
2011Symbol interdependency in symbolic and embodied cognition. TopiCS in Cognitive Science 31. 273–302.
Louwerse, Max M. & Patrick Jeuniaux
2010The linguistic and embodied nature of conceptual processing. Cognition 1141. 96–104.
Matthews, P.H
2007The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics (2nd edition). Oxford: OUP.
Nesset, Tore, Laura A. Janda, Julia Kuznetsova, Ol’ga Lyashevskaya, Anastasia Makarova & Svetlana Sokolova
2008Why poslushat’, but uslyshat’?Poljarnyj Vestnik 111. 38–46.
Newman, John
2008Aiming low in linguistics: Low-level generalizations in corpus-based research. Downloaded from [URL]; page last accessed on 07.06.2013
The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary
; 2nd Revised edition 1993Paul Falla, Marcus Wheeler & Boris Unbegaun (eds.). Oxford: OUP.
Paradis Carita & Mats Eeg-Olofsson
2013Describing sensory experience: The genre of wine reviews. In Rosario Caballero (guest ed.), Metaphor in and across genres. Thematic issue of Metaphor and Symbol 28(1). 22–40.
RNC
. Национальный корпус русского языка. [[URL]. Data extracted July2012].
Riordan, Brian & Michael N. Jones
2011Redundancy in perceptual and linguistic experience: Comparing feature-based and distributional models of semantic representation. TopiCS in Cognitive Science 31. 303–345.
Sahlgren, Magnus
2008The distributional hypothesis. Rivista di Linguistica 20(1). 33–53.
Šteinfeldt, Evi
1970Russian word count. Moscow: Progress.
Vigliocco, Gabriella, Lotte Meteyard, Mark Andrews & Stavroula Kousta
2009Toward a theory of semantic representation. Language and Cognition 1(2). 219–247.
Wilson, Margaret
2002Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9(4). 625–636.
Wnuk, Ewelina & Asifa Majid
2012Olfaction in a hunter-gatherer society: Insights from language and culture. In Naomi Miyake, David Peebles & Richard P. Cooper (eds.),
CogSci 2012: Proceedings of the 34th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society
, 1155–1160. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
2020. Exploring and Exploiting Uncertainty: Statistical Learning Ability Affects How We Learn to Process Language Along Multiple Dimensions of Experience. Cognitive Science 44:5
Divjak, Dagmar, Laurence Romain & Petar Milin
2023. From their point of view: the article category as a hierarchically structured referent tracking system. Linguistics 61:4 ► pp. 1027 ff.
Jansegers, Marlies, Clara Vanderschueren & Renata Enghels
2015. The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: A behavioral profile analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 26:3 ► pp. 381 ff.
Kiose, Maria
2020. The Interplay of Syntactic and Lexical Salience and its Effect on Default Figurative Responses. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 61:1 ► pp. 69 ff.
2023.
A quantitative study of the polysemy of Mandarin Chinese perception verb
kàn
‘look/see’
. Australian Journal of Linguistics 43:3 ► pp. 191 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.