The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: A behavioral profile analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir ('feel') which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver ('see') and mirar ('look'), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished -i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception.

Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

“…The semantic associations of perception verbs are, of course, not limited to cognition and linguistic communication. The languages investigated here add in particular to the burgeoning research on the polysemy of multi-sense verbs (e.g., Enghels and Jansegers 2013;Jansegers et al 2015), and demonstrate the value of examining verbs of touch, taste and smell, which are yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as sight and hearing verbs (Burenhult and Majid 2011;Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006;Wälchli 2016; see also Classen 1997).…”

“…It is common parlance to talk about hearing from someone who in fact made contact through a visual medium such as email; or to start a sentence with a peremptory Look, where no literal looking is required. Spontaneous spoken language is central to polysemy, as new senses of a word are thought to begin as products of pragmatic inference in interaction, and, through repeated instances, come to stick around as distinct meanings (Wilkins 1981;Sweetser 1990;Traugott and Dasher 2002;Jansegers et al 2015). Face-to-face conversation is also of considerable interest as regards the language of perception: conversation is a forum that enables interlocuters to calibrate and negotiate immediate perceptual experience through language; or, from a learner's perspective, match linguistic labels to qualia (Dahl 2000;Levinson and Majid 2014).…”

Towards a dynamic behavioral profile: A diachronic study of polysemous sentir in Spanish

“…Next, we prepared the data for a BP analysis and our extensions: All 4488 occurrences were annotated for a large set of properties, called ID tags. Our ID tags are based on those used in a previous synchronic BP study of the polysemy of sentir (Jansegers et al 2015), namely 34 different ID tags describing the presence or absence of 197 morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. Table 2 is an excerpt of the ID tags and their levels: 2 Since the sense annotation is an essential part of the analysis, this aspect merits some comments.…”

“…This methodology will be illustrated by means of a case study on the diachronic evolution of the Spanish verb sentir ('to feel'). In a previous synchronic BP study on the polysemy of sentir (Jansegers et al 2015), it has been shown that this verb displays a rich profile, both semanticallyextending from meanings of direct physical perception (both general physical perception (example 1) and specific modalities of perception, cf. example 2), through cognitive perception (3) to emotional values (4)and syntacticallytaking different kinds of complements:…”

On the edge between nouns and verbs. The heterogeneous behavior of Spanish deverbal nominalizations empirically verified

“…Besides the basic approach to prototypicality in terms of frequency (the underlying rationale being that more prototypical items of a class occur more frequently), what is highly interesting for our approach is its definition in terms of distribution. Indeed, more prototypical elements are taken to be less formally constrained and therefore appear in a wider variety of contexts (Gries, 2006;Jansegers et al, 2015). So, taking into account the multiplicity of determiners they can combine with, referential nominals clearly confirm their higher degree of prototypical nouniness.…”