Verbs of vision and category violations : Why see, look and watch are difficult to define

Abstract

Human beings are primarily visual creatures, receiving a large proportion of our information about the world through visual sensory experience. Despite the centrality of vision in our daily lives, the ways in which the visual sense is conceived by humans is largely mysterious. The English language lexicalizes the visual sense around three core words: see, look, and watch. Despite the high frequency of these verbs in English, the different meanings of the words can be extremely difficult to tease out. English language learners who make mistakes such as 'I went to the Louvre and watched the Mona Lisa' or 'I saw out of the window' inadvertently draw attention to the complexities of these verbs. To account for the difficulties of these words this paper proposes the existence of certain binary categorization schema in human cognition, such as animate versus inanimate, dynamic versus static, internal versus external, durative versus non-durative among others. The verbs of visual perception violate these category boundaries in such ways as crossing the internal/external boundary, flipping between static and dynamic and conceiving of the same action as both durative and non-durative. These category violations are at the heart of the difficulties encountered when trying to analyze the semantics of the verbs of visual perception.