Journal
Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, vol. 19 (2025)
Author(s)
Yuichiro Ogami
Abstract
It is well known that in English, the human experience of perception is widely expressed in the linguistic pattern using the verb have, and a similar situation is found in various European languages including Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. Contrary to this, in Japanese, sentences expressing perception with a possession verb corresponding to have are usually unnatural or, even when such sentences are accepted, they are marked. Instead, our perceptual experience is usually described in Japanese by a topic construction using the verb suru, corresponding to the English do. This paper theoretically explores how perceptual experience is construed in the Japanese perceptual suru construction by referring to the ideas of Cognitive Grammar. In conclusion, the paper proposes the view that many European languages, including English, generally conceptualize perceptual experience as the object’s possession of perceptual information, whereas Japanese interprets perceptual experience as an internal emergence of perceptual information obtained when the perceptual subject interacts with the object.