On the cross-linguistic equivalence of sentir(e) in Romance languages: a contrastive study in semantics

Recent linguistic studies on perception have focused mainly on verbs referring to the dominant visual and auditory modalities, (e.g. English see/look and hear/listen) and have largely ignored the minor verbs. The present paper seeks to fill this gap by comparing the complex semantics of the cognate verbs sentir(e) in three Romance languages, namely Spanish, French and Italian. Because the objective study of semantics is a problematic issue, we pay special attention to methodological problems and opt for a combined corpus approach involving both a translation corpus and comparable data. Evidence from both corpora indicates that, notwithstanding the fact that the rich polysemy of the three verbs partly coincides, each individual verb has undergone semantic specializations differentiating the morphological cognates

The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: a behavioral profile analysis

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception

From visual perception to evidentiality: A functional empirical approach to se ve que in Spanish

The Spanish sequence se ve (que) presents intricate functional polysemy, including constructionalization as an evidential. The present paper investigates its different formal-functional combinations and degrees of specialization as an evidential construction. The following questions were addressed: (1) How many different senses can be distinguished in the sequence se ve (que) and what are their respective frequencies? (2) How do these senses correlate with the morphosyntactic behavior of the sequence se ve (que)? (3) Which senses of se ve (que) are more closely related to each other, and how does the evidential construction relate to this polysemous network? The semantic and formal affinities of se ve (que) were studied through the Behavioral Profiles method developed by Gries and Divjak (2009), which provides an empirical, systematic and verifiable approach to studying lexical phenomena. Its application to a pragmatic phenomenon is a new departure. The results show seven senses of se ve (que), ranging from the lexical value of direct physical perception to the more abstract and evidential value of 'source of information'. According to the corpus analysis, the closest senses to the evidential pole are indirect physical perception and cognitive perception. These all introduce an inflected verb clause, possess propositional scope and are morphosyntactically frozen.

Evidential markers derived from visual perception in Spanish dialects : a contrastive study of por lo visto and se ve (que)

Verbs of perception (PV) are known to frequently give rise to discursive uses. PVs are used, for example, as evidential markers through grammaticalization processes. This study focuses on two evidential markers of Spanish derived from the visual PVs ver ('to see'), namely, 'por lo visto' and 'se ve (que)'. Although the attention dedicated to these evidential markers in Spanish has increased considerably in recent years, contrastive studies have not taken into account the dialectal variation of this phenomenon. We aspire to take a first step in filling this gap by contrastively studying 'por lo visto' and 'se ve (que)' in different dialects of Spanish by means of a comprehensive, empirical study. The results display the distribution of 'por lo visto' and 'se ve (que)' in the dialectal map of Spanish. In addition to the diatopic variation, the frequency differences also reveal some significant diaphasic variation (in this case linked to discursive genre). In general, the results show that 'se ve (que)' is used more frequently and appears more often in informal registers than 'por lo visto'. Likewise, 'se ve (que)' turns out to be more widespread geographically than 'por lo visto'

Towards a dynamic behavioral profile : a diachronic study of polysemous 'sentir' in Spanish

This study examines the diachronic evolution of the polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir (‘to feel’) by means of a corpus-based dynamic Behavioral Profile (BP) analysis. Methodologically, it presents the first application of the BP approach to historical data and proposes some methodological innovations not only within the current body of research in historical semantics, but also with regard to previous applications of the BP approach. First, whereas the majority of existing studies in quantitative historical semantics are largely based on observed frequencies or percentages of collocational co-occurrence, our study leverages more complex historical data that are based on the similarities of vectors. Second, this study also provides an extension of the methodological apparatus of the BP approach by complementing the traditional Hierarchical Agglomerative Cluster analysis (HAC) with a dynamic BP approach derived from Multidimensional Scaling maps (MDS). Theoretically, this methodology contributes to a comprehensive perspective on the process of Constructionalization and the nature of networks, which is illustrated on the basis of the development of the Discourse Marker (DM) lo siento (‘I’m sorry’)

El carácter multimodal del verbo 'sentir': polisemia y transitividad

Within the domain of perception verbs, the Spanish 'sentir' constitutes an interesting case because of its rich polysemy. The verb is not only used to denote several modalities of direct physical perception (tactile, olfactory, gustative and auditory), but it also extends towards the semantic domains of cognition and emotion. This article examines to what extent this multimodal character of the verb 'sentir' influences on its degree of transitivity. It is well known that perception verbs in general do not respond to the definition of prototypical transitive verbs, given that the perception process represents a mental rather than a physical contact between the perceiver/subject and the stimulus/object. It is shown, however, that the verb 'sentir' can be situated on different positions on the scale of transitivity, ranging from high transitivity to low transitivity, in function of the semantics it conveys. The validity of the elaborated hierarchy of transitivity is verified by means of empirical data