Semantic Structures of Vietnamese Perception Verbs: A Cognitive and Cultural Analysis

This study investigates how Vietnamese speakers employ perception verbs to understand and depict life experiences through their metaphorical extensions and explore the linguistic practices regarding Vietnamese socio-cognitive patterns. The study employs qualitative analysis of Vietnamese poems, proverbs, and idioms. This study analyzes linguistic aspects in the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), examining language and thought in their embodied nature, both in relation to the mind (Sweetser, 1990) and as culturally oriented phenomena (Kovecses, 2005). The analysis emphasizes collating usage frequency statistics in varied contexts (poetry, proverbs, idioms) and documentation of semantic shifts across different forms of perception verbs. The results showed how Vietnamese perception verbs are used in conjunction with physical senses and have a solid relationship to abstract thoughts, which is explained by the theory of mind as a bodily metaphor while having universal and culture-specific features consistent with core Vietnamese culture. The findings contribute to linguistic theory and cultural studies by demonstrating how cultural factors influence metaphorical mappings in Vietnamese perception verbs while complementing empirical evidence of embodied cognition. The findings are relevant to cross-cultural communication, language teaching, linguistic and cultural studies of the relationships between language and culture and provide the methodological basis for the analysis of such phenomena in other languages and illustrate the interdependent nature between the structure of the language and culture.