A behavioral profile study of vision verbs from a cross-linguistic perspective
Cross-linguistically,there are two basic types of vision verbs,viz.,"visual activity verbs"(the action-oriented LOOK type)and"visual experience verbs"(the result-oriented SEE type).However,there is controversy over whether such a distinction exists among Mandarin vision verbs.Some scholars believe that the two basic vision verbs kan and jian have distinct meanings,whereas others claim that they are almost the same in meaning.To resolve this divergence,this study conducted a corpus-based behavioral profile analysis of Mandarin vision verbs from a cross-linguistic perspective,finding that:1)similar to most languages,Mandarin vision verbs possess both the meanings of visual activity and visual experience and they are also capable of expressing cognitive meanings;2)in contrast to some Indo-European languages,Mandarin has more visual activity verbs,which can extend into a broader range of semantic domains and occupy core positions in hierarchical clustering;and 3)from a cross-linguistic perspective,Mandarin shows a preference for visual activity meaning over visual experience meaning,and it is the failure to recognize this aspect that leads to the above-mentioned differing views.
万方数据
维普
