Construal and variable discourse patterns explain the typology of visual perception verbs

In this paper, I analyze the crosslinguistic variation in visual perception events in terms of event construals and their usage in discourse. Through an innovative computational analysis of a comparable corpus of 31 typologically diverse languages, I demonstrate that the crosslinguistic variation is governed by two dimensions of construal: the profiling of the Stimulus, and the way in which the Experiencer is construed to exert effort. Whether languages draw lexical boundaries in the conceptual field (some do, others don’t) is furthermore correlated with variation in the usage of construals: a greater prevalence of bridging contexts between the crosslinguistically most often separately lexified extremes (and accompanying opposite construals) is found be associated with drawing a lexical boundary. As such, this paper grounds semantic typological explanation in notions of event construal and a usage-based conception of linguistic structure.