Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
University of Isfahan
Abstract
In linguistic research, the typology of perception verbs has been investigated across numerous languages from a variety of perspectives. As fundamental components of language, verbs play a pivotal role in semantic interpretation. perception verbs, in particular, exhibit diverse meanings across linguistic contexts and serve as important indicators of polysemy. Consequently, exploring their semantic relationships in a cross-linguistic framework has attracted considerable scholarly interest.
This study examines the verbs of perception in Persian language within a typological framework. Its primary objective is to determine the position of Persian perception verbs in Viberg’s (1983) hierarchy. Additional aims include conducting a semantic and syntactic analysis. In the initial phase of the study, the core perception verbs of Persian were systematically identified and catalogued. These comprised did-an (“to see”), shenid-an (“to hear”), chashid-an (“to taste”), buyid-an (“to smell”), and lams kardan (“to touch”). Upon establishing the set of target verbs, a comprehensive corpus search was undertaken. This process was conducted primarily through the native search functionalities of the corpora, supplemented, where necessary, by the application of regular expressions. The resulting data were extracted in text-file format and subsequently imported into statistical and qualitative analysis environments, specifically Excel and SPSS.
The corpus-based analysis of perception vocabulary was used to test two hypothesized universals: (1) vision is the dominant sensory modality, and (2) the relative ranking of the senses is cross-culturally consistent. The results confirm that visual references are markedly more frequent than those to other senses, suggesting a universal attentional bias toward visual phenomena. Nevertheless, the relative frequencies of the other senses varied cross-linguistically. These findings indicate that both universal constraints and culture-specific factors contribute to shaping linguistic representations of perception. While the visual-dominance hypothesis was strongly supported, the study did not identify a single universal sensory hierarchy. The remaining modalities displayed greater variation in frequency and referential scope.
Although hearing frequently ranked second after vision in many languages, this pattern was not universal. Thus, the predominance of hearing over touch, taste, and smell may be regarded as a probable—but not absolute—universal tendency. We argue that the observed global bias toward hearing is also linked to communicative salience, as visual verbs across languages tend to exhibit a higher degree of markedness compared to non-visual sensory verbs.
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