Grammaticalization of Verbs of Cognition and Perception

This paper is an exploration of the grammaticalization phenomena displayed by the verbs of cognition and perception. Drawing upon cross-linguistically attested data, this paper shows that verbs of cognition and perception predominantly grammaticalize into epistemic markers. This is a natural consequence because the grammaticalized markers exhibit semantic residue of the source items, which, in this case, make direct reference to the sources of the human construal of the world affairs. This paper explicates how other grammatical functions are developed from these verbs. In so doing it also argues that the features that are selected for grammaticalization are those that are experientially salient features in conceptual event schemas.