Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

2.2 Identifying polysemies
To investigate transfield meanings of perception words, we began in phase one with a bottom-up approach, looking at the “free translations” provided by researchers for each example. We collapsed different grammatical forms of the same verb (e.g., the separate translations ‘think’ and ‘thinking’) as one item and grouped semantically similar items together, examining the original context where necessary to understand the meaning. The groupings were made independently by four native English speakers (the authors), with discrepancies then resolved by consensus, resulting in the groups of meanings shown in Table 1. As sight verbs were the most frequent, semantic associations to them dominate. The first group (gathered under the label cognition) includes items that were considered cognition-related concepts. Items concerning focused attention, including scrutiny, assessment, and careful attentiveness — for example, to potential danger — form a second group (attention). Other recurrent themes identified in the free translations were socializing, locating, trying, and co-identification. Several of these have been identified in the literature as common extensions of perception verbs, and we include a selection of relevant references in the Supplementary Materials. Linguistic communication did not emerge as a single grouping during this process, but — as we shall see — meanings relevant to this domain were distributed across several of the existing groups. Meanings that occurred only once or that were judged not to belong to a particular group were noted and set aside for later investigation.
Table 1:
Recurrent semantic associations of perception verbs.

Recurrent association	Meanings (using English as a meta-language) included in this group
cognition	understand, think, know (about), believe, figure out, find out, deduce, remember, imagine, realize, discover
attention	check (on/over/out), scrutinize, inspect, examine, assess, review, watch out/over, be careful, pay attention to, look after, heed
socializing	meet, come together, visit
locating	look for, search (for), find, locate
trying	try, test, try out, attempt
co-identification	consider to be (something), regard as (something)

In phase two, for each meaning group, researchers were asked to re-examine the one-hour sample and identify examples where a sight, hearing, and/or multi-sense term was used with one of the meanings listed in the second column of Table 1. This process confirmed the presence of candidate meanings in the data, and allowed for clearer comparison across languages, as everyone used the same criteria (and the same proxy meta-language, English) for the identification of polysemies. Researchers were also asked to identify examples of any polysemies for verbs of any sense modality that were not included in the meaning groups shown in Table 1. This ensured we did not miss less frequent sense extensions. Where there were discrepancies between “singleton” meanings identified in phases one and two, these were checked again in consultation with the relevant researcher(s).
We took a broad interpretation of polysemy in relation to both meaning and form: when determining the presence of an extended semantic association, we did not require a literal sensory meaning be impossible, but only that an extended reading (also) be present. As such, many of the cases represent a kind of “bridging context” (Wilkins 1981), where the item can be understood with both literal and extended meanings; for example, when see means ‘meet, interact with’, the situation that is so described typically involves literally seeing a person, as well as the additional social meaning. Furthermore, we included meanings that were vested in constructions as well as in individual words, counting both “loose” and “strict” colexification (François 2008). As an example, English look for is counted as a locating meaning of a vision verb in our survey, even though this is a lexicalized verb + preposition combination; and serialization of the Duna vision verb to mean ‘attempt to…’ is counted as a trying meaning, even though this is constructional (seeHorie 1993; Vesterinen 2010; Jansegers et al. 2015, inter alia, concerning complementation and the semantics of perception verbs). We also allowed cases where the specialized meaning was largely inseparable from explicit or implicit contextual elements (e.g., meanings to do with social interaction generally only arise when both arguments of the verb are human). ^[4]
Two further types of extended uses of perception verbs were examined in detail. First, discourse uses were identified according to their function, and a subset of instances examined with close reference to their context. Second, potential intrafield extensions of perception verbs were located according to the lemma and the perception meanings specified for each token, and re-confirmed with the relevant expert(s).
In the results that follow, we give an overview of transfield semantic associations and then present discourse uses for each modality: sight (Section 3.1), hearing (Section 3.2), touch, taste, smell (Section 3.3) and multi-sense verbs (Section 3.4). Finally, we discuss intrafield extensions (Section 3.5). While each meaning found in the database merits discussion and investigation in its own right, we limit ourselves to a few illustrative examples of cognition, attention, discourse, and intrafield extensions. Representative examples of all other meanings found in this investigation, as well as some notes on corresponding or similar meanings reported for other languages in the literature, are given in the Supplementary Materials for this paper.
3 Results