Cultural conceptualizations of sight and cultural values

Abstract

The relationship between visual experience and cognition manifested in the thinking/knowing/understanding is seeing metaphor, is claimed to be the primary vision metaphor in various languages. However, only a few studies considered its extension to less central domains such as cultural values. The paper seeks to understand how the figurative usages of Hungarian vision verbs refer to the cultural values of morality, respect, and hospitality. Three verbs of vision are invesitaged employing Cultural Linguistic and cognitive semantic analyses, namely, néz ‘look/watch’, lát ‘see’, and tekint ‘look/glance’. It is demonstrated that visual perception in Hungarian has a significant role in moral reasoning; however, there are substantial differences in the ways these vision verbs relate to them. To find a motivational explanation for these differences, the semantic properties of the verbs are identified through contrastive analysis and by observing their semantic profiles within the vision scenario. As a result, a cultural model of each verb is reconstructed. The study gives a refined view on the linkage of sight and cultural values in Hungarian, furthermore, the proposed methodology can be effectively applied to various areas of perception research in a cultural context.