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.