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Reconnecting Form and Meaning: In honour of Kristin Davidse
Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
[Studies in Language Companion Series 230] 2023
► pp. 209–236

Chapter 8
A cognitive-functional approach to watch as a verb of perception

| Cardiff University
| Cardiff University

This chapter investigates the semantic and lexico-grammatical profile of watch as an atypical verb of visual perception. Although watch is classified as a behavioural process within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Davidse 2017), it displays features which make it difficult to categorize. We investigate the particular features of watch (including Aktionsart and complement types) through a dataset extracted from COCA (Davies 2008–), in comparison with see as a more typical verb of visual perception. Our results show that watch emerges as an agentive durative transitive verb which typically takes a distinctive event complement. Its unique profile challenges attempts to classify it, providing an example of a verb which appears to be in a fringe “transition area” (Davidse 1999: 303).

Keywords: Aktionsart, perception verbs, watch , telicity, complementation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1 Watch and its comparison with see
    • 2.2Aktionsart and telicity
    • 2.3 Watch as a behavioural process
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus pattern analysis
    • 3.2Additional analysis including telicity
    • 3.3Statistical analyses
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1A semantic profile of watch
    • 4.2Aktionsart
    • 4.3Complementation and telicity
    • 4.4 Watch as a behavioural process
  • 5.Concluding remarks and future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.230.08chr
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