Cognitive Linguistics 2015; 26(1): 31  –  60

Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies Abstract: To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experi-ence and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoc-cupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual lan-guage by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cul-tures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, sug-gesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the rela-tive frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultura