On the cross-linguistic equivalence of sentir(e) in Romance languages: a contrastive study in semantics

Recent linguistic studies on perception have focused mainly on verbs referring to the dominant visual and auditory modalities, (e.g. English see/look and hear/listen) and have largely ignored the minor verbs. The present paper seeks to fill this gap by comparing the complex semantics of the cognate verbs sentir(e) in three Romance languages, namely Spanish, French and Italian. Because the objective study of semantics is a problematic issue, we pay special attention to methodological problems and opt for a combined corpus approach involving both a translation corpus and comparable data. Evidence from both corpora indicates that, notwithstanding the fact that the rich polysemy of the three verbs partly coincides, each individual verb has undergone semantic specializations differentiating the morphological cognates