ABSTRACT
W hatever the facts of physics and physiology, I feel that I look out at the world through my eyes; that I can look through the window over the treetops down toward the city below. The ancient Greeks, too, thought that the eyes send out beams that meet objects and make them visible to us. And
linguists, starting at least with Gruber in 1967, have noted that verbs of perception appear in the same syntactic and semantic constructions as verbs of motion. Various terms have been used to designate the imagined “probe” that emanates from the eyes. Gruber suggests that we speak of someone’s “gaze” going across a room, just as we speak of a person going across a room. In Talmy’s insightful analysis of “ctive motion” he speaks of “the motion of the line of sight that emerges from my eyes” (Talmy, 2000a, p. 110). In a dissertation on English perception verbs, Gisborne (1996) refers to “the path of the gaze” (p. 41) and suggests that the gaze itself is a “hidden theme” (p. 154). Talmy provides an example-I looked into/toward/past/away from the valley-and proposes a corresponding image schema:
This conceptualization has received explicit formulation in the FrameNet Project of Fillmore and his colleagues (Johnson, Fillmore et al., 2001). Verbs such as look t in the frame PERCEPTION_ACTIVE, which “contains perception words whose Perceivers intentionally direct their attention to some entity or phenomenon in order to have a perceptual experience.” 1 The Frame has the following elements that are relevant to the present chapter:
Perceiver-Agentive He looked into the house. Phenomenon He looked at the house. Direction He looked across the street. Location of Perceiver He looked from the balcony. Manner He looked carefully.
