COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC FOUNDATIONS OF A PERCEPTUAL MEANING IN ENGLISH

Perception is not a passive imprint of the external world but an active, meaning‑making process that shapes lexical choice, grammatical behaviour, and discourse organisation in English. This article surveys the scientific and theoretical foundations of perceptual phenomena in English, integrating insights from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of mind. First, it traces the treatment of perception verbs in generative semantics and cognitive grammar. Second, it reviews empirical studies on embodiment and cross‑modal metaphor that reveal how sensorimotor experience constrains conceptual structure. Third, it addresses construction‑specific evidence from corpus linguistics that highlights argument‑structure alternations linked to perceptual construal. The discussion shows how perception operates as a bridge between bodily experience and linguistic patterning, offering directions for interdisciplinary research and pedagogical practice.