Swedish verbs of perception from a typological and contrastive perspective

• Verbs of perception hold a central position among  mental verbs. What makes such verbs particularly interesting is their complex patterns of polysemy that both show crosslinguistic regularities and language-specific (or area-specific) characteristics. This paper accounts for the major semantic extensions of the basic verbs of perception in Swedish from a crosslinguistic perspective based primarily on data from two translation corpora. Varying patterns of semantic extensions are found in Swedish and the other languages within the field of perception. There is also a rich variety of   extensions into cognition, verbal communication and more distant fields such as possession, social contact and causation. Verbs of  perception  appear in a wide range of  constructions. Brief  indications are also given of the interactions between various meanings of the perception verbs and  morpho-syntactic devices such as complementation, impersonal constructions, the passive, spatial markers and prefixed forms of  verbs.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

lexical semantics

typology

contrastive study

verbs of perception

Swedish

Linguistics

Lingvistik

Linguistics

lingvistik

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)