“Do You See and Hear More? A Study on Telugu Perception Verbs”

Abstract

Verbs of perception describe the actual perception of some entity and it is emphasized by earlier researchers that lexicon in languages is conceptually-oriented and is necessary for our daily communicative needs. In this paper, we demonstrate and explain, which among the perception verbs have the higher frequencies of all the five senses (vision, hear, smell, taste, touch) by using a Telugu corpus and self-rating task. This study shows a greater lexical differentiation when compared to studies done using English corpus and other languages. Based on our analysis–vision, followed by hear are the most commonly used verbs in daily communicative needs by the Telugu speakers as compared to touch, taste, and smell; The inconsistency in usage of other senses are not identical to the vision and hear in other studies, it may be due to sampling and methodological variations in the corpus of different language, but in common these two senses play a key role in perception verbs. The study of Telugu perception verbs may give more interesting facts and insights into the cognitive linguistics paradigm.