Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective

1.3. This study: presentation of aims and the corpus
Swedish makes many semantic distinctions between various types of 
Phenomenon-based visual and auditory perception verbs and provides 
a good starting-point for studying what characterizes such verbs from 
a cross-linguistic perspective. What are the basic semantic parameters? 
The following sections are devoted to a discussion of such verbs from a 
contrastive perspective. Literal and extended meanings of visual and audi-
tory Experiencer-based verbs have already been studied in Viberg (2008) 
based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (see below) and across 
13 typologically diverse languages in San Roque et al. (2018). See also 
Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013) on perception metaphors across languages.
Section 2 is devoted to sensory verbs, Section 3 to sensory copulas 
and Section 4 to perceptibility verbs. Data for Section 2 will be taken 
from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) consisting of English 
and Swedish original texts together with their translations into the other 
language (Altenberg & Aijmer 2000). Data for Sections 3 and 4 will be 
taken from the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC), which at present 
consists of extracts from 22 Swedish novels and their translations into 
English, German, French and Finnish (around 600,000 words in the 
Swedish originals). Examples from this corpus will be marked by a text 
code based on the initials of the author’s name (see the list of the works 
quoted at the end of the article). French turns out to be a particularly 
interesting language to compare with. Vinay & Darbelnet ([1958] 1995: 
53-56) state that English has a more diversified vocabulary than French 
to describe visual and auditory phenomena. Tegelberg (2000: 87-115) 
shows with data from a translation corpus that French has fewer such 
words than Swedish. Both these works discuss sensory light and sound 
verbs, whereas the present paper will focus on sensory copulas. Such 
verbs are compared in English and German with a focus on evidential 
meanings in Whitt (2010).