Synonyms in Functional Competition: The Case of Grammaticalization of Visual Perception Verbs in English

This paper addresses grammaticalization of major visual perception verbs in English and their functional competition in Modern English. Four of the sixteen visual perception verbs appear at a relatively high frequency (i.e., over 100,000 tokens) in the COCA corpus, i.e., see, look, watch, and consider. Verbs tend to grammaticalize through participial constructions into connectives and prepositions, with various meanings of propositional relationship, or through imperative constructions into discourse markers serving diverse discursive purposes. Since they have semantic affinity and structural similarity, their grammaticalized forms are expected to be largely compatible and even interchangeable with other visual perception verbs, which, however, is not upheld in real-life usage. This challenges the source determination hypothesis (Bybee et al. 1994). This paper argues that this state of affairs is largely due to different paths of semantic extension of the source lexemes, which lead to dissimilar specialization, as well as other external factors.