Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

mɨn	halɨɨj	n-nɛ:ŋ	gɛʔ
nu=blɒ:ʔ
when	alone	1sg-see/look	a.little	lat=where
ʔi=sɛ̃:k
tpc=to.smell.foul/rank

‘When alone, I searched for [smelt] the bad-smelling places.’ (Sem_057/ST)
In (15), a potential smell meaning for the vision verb nɛɛŋ arises because of the olfactory nature of the percept in a situation where nɛɛŋ is used with a locating meaning (‘search for’); so the transfield meaning provides the bridge to a potential intrafield meaning. Similar examples are found in Spanish, where ver ‘see’ is used to talk about finding out about the taste of food; and in Whitesands, where the verb teling ‘listen’ is used to talk about paying attention to a tactile percept (the tug of a fishing line).
The intrafield polysemies attested in the database (sight>hearing, smell, taste; and hearing>touch) agree with Viberg’s (1983) hypothesis that sense extensions will be unidirectional, moving from higher to lower on his proposed hierarchy (see>hear>touch, taste, smell), also supported by Evans and Wilkins’ (2000) findings. In addition, we argue that intrafield polysemies are generally facilitated by transfield use (cf.Viberg 1983: 140–141).
4 Discussion
The potential for a word to express different but related meanings remains an abiding but incompletely understood facet of human language. The polysemy of basic perception verbs is a classic testing ground for the investigation of universal and culture-specific forces in language and cognition, and in this study we take a step forward by examining what extensions of this domain are, in fact, encountered in everyday interaction across diverse languages. We find a high level of agreement in conversational corpora for the extended uses of basic sensory verbs, as well as evidence of their rich semantic and pragmatic range. Conversation can ground claims from the literature in what people from diverse linguistic backgrounds actually say and do day-to-day.
Strikingly, even small slices of interaction from very different languages and cultures all show evidence for a lexicalized link between sensory experience and cognition. Using verbs that describe perception to talk about knowledge, discovery, thought and understanding is not only possible in language, it is also a typical feature of spontaneous dyadic or multi-party language in different cultures. Evidence from conversation suggests that visual and other sensory experience is also construed as emblematic of attention. The data further support claims that verbs of sight are likely to be used to talk about the social domain (e.g.,Aikhenvald and Storch 2013), while the association of vision with potentiality and with the expression of subjective stances suggests intriguing areas for further cross-linguistic inquiry. Uses of hearing verbs (and certain multi-sense verbs) in spontaneous conversation confirm that audition has a special association with linguistic communication, as transfield meanings related almost exclusively to speech and communication (e.g., ‘understand’, ‘ask’, ‘tell’). The representation of speech as an aural percept seems likely to have a profound impact on the emergent semantics of auditory verbs, as well as multi-sense verbs.
Almost all of the languages studied evince the role of perception verbs in discursive practices; for example, through directing attention to upcoming talk. While the precise discourse functions of perceptual vocabulary across languages are yet to be subjected to comprehensive and systematic study, our database establishes the relevance of vision, audition, and multi-sense verbs to the management of everyday linguistic interaction in a range of cultural settings beyond the well-known languages of Europe.
Turning to intrafield extensions, the conversational data support Viberg’s claim that sight verbs generally undergo semantic shifts to “lower” sensory modalities. More intriguingly, our data suggest that transfield meanings are important to the development of intrafield polysemies (and eventually multi-sense terms), pointing to the necessary role of encultured language use — in particular conversation — as the medium for proposed psychophysical influences on semantic change (Evans and Wilkins 2000).
The cross-linguistic prevalence of several of the meanings and functions discussed here — that is, the evidence that they are activated in everyday conversation in very different cultural-language environments — spotlights the question of whether these semantic associations tap into some kind of cognitive universal. For example, perhaps the connection between perceptual and cognitive meanings is motivated by a common, embodied experience of transforming sensory stimuli into mental objects, and this is what drives their robust recurrence. While possible, this proposal is still distinct to those proposed previously. A complementary theme is how the language of perception connects to potential universals of human sociality. On one level, this is evident in the common semantic associations of vision terms with social interaction, and of hearing and multi-sense terms with the social activity of linguistic communication. In addition, perception terms are used as discourse markers to establish joint attention, redistribute epistemic access, and manage intersubjective alignment between conversation participants. Such interactional and discourse motivations may well conspire with cognition and culture to effect semantic change, in turn supporting the development of attentional and epistemic meanings for sight, hearing, and multi-sense verbs. So, the same word may be used not only in relating perceptual, and by extension, cognitive activity, but also in registering new knowledge in the moment; or to direct attention not only to avert a physical threat in the environment, but also to avoid a potential rift in interpersonal accord. Engagement with interactional dynamics — as well as a backdrop of shared psychophysical experience — appears likely to shape the use of perceptual language across diverse linguistic and cultural settings.
In sum, even small amounts of conversational data display a broad spectrum of meanings for perception verbs, many of which are astonishingly uniform across samples from diverse cultures. To explain these findings, the possibility of interactionally-driven universals adds a new dimension to the dichotomy of cognitive universality versus cultural relativism (as per Levinson 2006; Kendrick et al. 2014). The language of perception is likely to be an important tool for coordinating joint attention, sharing experience and calibrating knowledge across interlocutors, including awareness of linguistic communication itself (Majid and Levinson 2011; San Roque et al. 2015). While culturally, linguistically and environmentally mediated, these basic practices are central to human interaction in general, putting social motivations front and center as a further source for universal semantic associations.
5 Conclusion
Three features of the conversational data manifest a general conceptual link between perception and cognition (Ibarrexte-Antuñano 2008). First, all languages show co-lexification of perception and cognition-related meanings in typical language use. Second, this is found not only for sight verbs, but also for hearing and multi-sense verbs in certain languages, and even to some degree for verbs of touch, taste and smell. This highlights the need for further in-depth language-specific study of the lexical associations and cultural conceptions of the “lower senses” of touch, taste and smell (see, e.g., Backhouse 1994;Burenhult and Majid 2011; Storch 2013). Third, the fact that vision verbs and (non-visual) multi-sense verbs share several semantic and pragmatic associations supports the treatment of perception as a unified domain for extension. The connection between hearing verbs and linguistic communication is likewise supported by the conversational data, but with the important reminder that multi-sense verbs also participate in this semantic domain.
Overall, vision verbs in all languages, as well as some hearing and multi-sense verbs, colexified both attentional and/or cognitive meanings. Such meanings link to attentional and epistemic discourse actions, whereby participants redirect attention to objects in the environment, signal shifts in the trajectory of talk, and register changes in their own states of knowledge. We found that sight, audition, and multi-sense verbs were all used with discursive functions, ultimately in service to the establishment, maintenance or repair of intersubjective alignment between conversational participants.
Intrafield extensions of vision and audition verbs in conversation point to a potential paradox in the language of perception. Evans and Wilkins (2000: 547) concluded that constraints on intrafield extensions in the sensory lexicon are determined by “neurophysiological givens (the structure and experience of basic perception)”, in contrast with transfield extensions, which may be more open to cultural variation. The specific case they discuss is the way that particular cultural factors, for example, the primacy of oral (as opposed to written) transmission of knowledge, or the (potentially negative) marked nature of sustained direct eye contact in social interaction, contribute to the semantic extensions of audition and vision verbs (Evans and Wilkins 2000: 580–585). Ultimately, they argue that “the same domain [i.e., perception] can have its ‘universal’ and ‘relativistic’ sides; a foot in nature and a foot in culture” (Evans and Wilkins 2000: 546). Our findings suggest that universal patterns (the direction of intrafield extensions) are nevertheless reached via what have been supposed to be culturally-mediated pathways (i.e., transfield extensions); or, in other words, it may be culture that opens the door to nature. This serves as a reminder that even the most widespread of semantic associations must come about incrementally, through contextualized interactions between encultured individuals using a specific language. As such, any universal polysemous meanings must arise not in opposition to diversity, but rather dwell within it.