PERCEPTION PROCESSES: SEEING, HEARING AND FEELING
As expressed by the non-volitional senses of see and hear in English, perception is an involuntary state, which does not depend upon the agency of the perceiver, who in fact receives the visual and auditory sensations non-volitionally. However, as the term Recipient has been adopted for the one who receives goods and information in three- participant processes, we will keep to the terms Experiencer or Senser. In the following illustrations you will notice that can is used when expressing non-volitional perception at the moment of speaking. This use replaces the present progressive, which is ungrammatical in such cases (*I am smelling gas).
Tom saw a snake. Can you taste the lemon in the sauce?
I can feel a draught. I can smell gas.
We heard a noise.
The verbs see and feel are often used in English as conceptual metaphors for the cognitive processes of understanding and believing, respectively, as in You do see my point, don’t you? – No, I don’t see what you mean. I feel we should talk this over further. In addition, see has a number of dynamic uses, such as See for yourself! with the meaning of ‘verify’, and see someone off, meaning ‘accompany someone to the station, airport’, among many others.
Corresponding to non-volitional see and hear, English has the dynamic volitional verbs look, watch and listen, among others. These are classed as behavioral processes.
The perception processes of ‘feeling, ‘smelling’ and ‘tasting’ each make use of one verb (feel, smell and taste) to encode three different ways of experiencing these sensations: one stative and non-volitional (I can smell gas), a second dynamic and volitional (Just smell these roses!) and the third as a relational process (This fish smells bad). In languages other than English, these differences may be lexicalized as different verbs.
In processes of seeing, hearing and feeling, English allows the Phenomenon to represent a situation that is either completed (I saw her cross the road) or not completed (I saw her crossing the road).
