The structure of the sight domain in Slavic: Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian verbs of visual perception in a parallel corpus

Abstract The paper offers a quantitative exploration of semantic relations between sight verbs in three Slavic languages – Bulgarian, Polish and Russian. Based on parallel-corpus data, I use the frequencies of pairwise correspondence between a broad range of sight verbs. The goal is to test the relevance of semantic distinctions typically drawn in typologically-oriented research on perception and to explore the semantic structure of the class in an empirically grounded way. First, the study addresses the relation between basic verbs and semantic generality. Basic and non-basic sight verbs within one language are compared with respect to their similarity to basic verbs of the other languages and in terms of the evenness of their correspondences to non-basic verbs in the other languages. The results show that the distinction between basic and non-basic verbs can be more or less clear-cut depending on the semantic type of verbs and on the language. Second, the distinction between ‘see’- and ‘look’-verbs was found relevant for the structuring on the domain of sight. Sight verbs are similar either to basic ‘see’-verbs or to ‘look’-verbs, or to neither of the two. There is more potential for lexical renewal among ‘look’-verbs as compared to ‘see’-verbs. Finally, the study shows that imperfective ‘look’-verbs more freely correspond to each other than perfectives, suggesting less clear semantic contrasts in the descriptions of ongoing perception as compared to the result of perception.