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Article published In: Interactional Linguistics
Vol. 4:1 (2024) ► pp.38–67

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Seeing is believing

The multisensorial emergence of the Estonian näed ‘you see’ as an evidential

ORCiD logo with link | Linköping University
 | University of Tartu
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Linköping University.

Published online: 23 October 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/il.23003.kee
Abstract
Verbs of perception are known for their prolific use in various non-literal functions that are usually argued to have developed from their denotational semantics (San Roque, L., Kendrick, K. H., Norcliffe, E. & Majid, E. (2018). Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction. Cognitive Linguistics 29(3), 371–406. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In this study we document interactional practices involving the Estonian 2nd person verb form näed ’you see’ to demonstrate that its usage is anchored in face-to-face situations where the speaker guides a co-present other’s visual attention. Through multimodal analysis we show how näed is coordinated with the participants’ body orientations, gestures, and gazes to point to visually available proof for one’s current arguments, rendering it an evidential meaning even in its most “literal” uses of seeing, when a co-participant is invited to consider the visual evidence. We argue that the spatially anchored uses constitute a natural habitat of verbs of seeing, as visual perception is a mutually calibrated interactional accomplishment. Relevant syntactic constructions emerge in real time conversation where näed, calling for a visual orientation, is either preceded or followed by clausal specifications of what is to be seen, which makes it look like a particle. This challenges the argument that perception verbs start out as syntactic predicates in full clauses to then develop other uses.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pragmaticalization of perception verbs
  • 3.Verbs of seeing in interaction
  • 4.Seeing as a complex social achievement
  • 5.The data and method
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1The achievement of joint seeing
    • 6.2Providing visible evidence to support own stance
    • 6.3Evidence in a narrative space
    • 6.4Evidence in speech
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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