Visual perception verbs in Catalan: Semantic classification and Distribution in written genres

Abstract

This work focuses on the study of the meanings conveyed by two visual perception verbs (mirar and veure) in Central Catalan within the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics. Our objective is twofold: (i) to analyze and describe them in order to establish metaphorical and metonymic semantic projections; and (ii) to determine the intralinguistic distribution of the non-prototypical meanings of these verbs. We have analyzed examples extracted from dictionaries (mostly DIEC2) and 1.750 forms picked out from the literary narrative and press texts of the Corpus textual informatitzat de la llengua catalana (CTILC). By analyzing these examples and the context in which they appear, we establish the boundaries between literal and figurative meanings, and we show that the frequency of use of each verb is different: some figurative meanings are more prominent than others, both from a general pint of view and from the kind of texts analyzed. The results obtained in this work serve to thicken the corpus of data on perception verbs in different languages in terms of the presence, use and distribution of certain meanings.