Visual and auditory perception in narrative discourse: a contrastive approach

Abstract

This study presents a corpus-based investigation comparing the expression of auditory and visual perception in traditional storytelling in five languages: Chuvash, Nganasan, Selkup, Udihe, and Wan. We include languages with different types of evidential markers, as well as languages with no grammatical expression of evidentiality, and we also consider cases where perception is implicit in the narrative context. We examine whether the use of grammatical markers for sensory perception correlates with speakers’ overall sensitivity to the information source and its frequency of mention in narrative discourse. Despite the typological differences between the languages, the results show a general preference for vision over hearing, both in contexts where sensations are expressed overtly and in cases where they are left unexpressed. This trend is reversed only in cases where sensory perception is suggested through the use of ideophones. Furthermore, we observe a stronger tendency for lexical encoding of visual as opposed to auditory perception. We explore possible reasons for this tendency and conclude that it is not conditioned by linguistic factors such as agentivity or preferred stimulus type (dynamic vs. static). These results suggest an independent, potentially universal bias toward encoding visual experience in narrative discourse.