Tags · Domain
Perception
Seeing, hearing, and the other senses.
Topics with this tag
Pathway
How does “listen” come to mean “obey”?
Verbs of hearing and listening repeatedly grow a sense of obeying. The pattern recurs from Mandarin tīnghuà and Japanese iu koto o kiku to Latin oboedīre, built on audīre “to hear”, behind French obéir and English obey.
PerceptionObligationColexificationMetonymy +1
From hearing words to obedience →
Pathway
How does “see” come to mean “try”?
Verbs of seeing repeatedly become markers of attempting. Japanese 食べてみる “eat and see”, Korean 먹어 보다, Mandarin 試試看, and the Turkic converb + kör- constructions all say “do it and see” for “try doing it”; Voinov (2013) traces the co-lexification across Eurasia, New Guinea, India, and West Africa.
PerceptionModalityColexificationMultiverb construction +5
From seeing to trying →