Start Date: 4/11/2024 11:00 AM EDT
End Date: 4/11/2024 12:00 PM EDT
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LSA Webinar Team
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Join the Editor of Language, John Beavers in a conversation with Elisabeth Norcliffe about her paper, 'Verbs of Perception: A Quantitative Typological Study,' published in Language, Volume 100, Number 1, March 2024. This paper was co-authored by Elisabeth Norcliffe and Asifa Majid from Oxford University.
Abstract
Previous studies have proposed that the lexicalization of perception verbs is constrained by a biologically grounded hierarchy of the senses. Other research traditions emphasize conceptual and communicative factors instead. Drawing on a balanced sample of perception verb lexicons in 100 languages, we found that vision tends to be lexicalized with a dedicated verb, but that nonvisual
modalities do not conform to the predictions of the sense-modality hierarchy. We also found strong asymmetries in which sensory meanings colexify. Rather than a universal hierarchy of the senses, we suggest that two domain-general constraints—conceptual similarity and communicative need—interact to shape lexicalization patterns.
