Acceso usuarios
;
Irasema Cruz Domínguez
[2]
Arrondissement Gent, Bélgica
México
Within the domain of perception verbs, the Spanish sentir constitutes an interesting case because of its rich polysemy. The verb is not only used to denote several modalities of direct physical perception (tactile, olfactory, gustative and auditory), but it also extends towards the semantic domains of cognition and emotion. This article examines to what extent this multimodal character of the verb sentir influences on its degree of transitivity. It is well known that perception verbs in general do not respond to the definition of prototypical transitive verbs, given that the perception process represents a mental rather than a physical contact between the perceiver/subject and the stimulus/object. It is shown, however, that the verb sentir can be situated on different positions on the scale of transitivity, ranging from high transitivity to low transitivity, in function of the semantics it conveys. The validity of the elaborated hierarchy of transitivity is verified by means of empirical data.
