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Cognition through vision: Russian verbs of visual perception with a cognitive reading

It is said that seeing is knowing. The belief that the perception and the cognition are closely related is reflected in the use and the interpretation of the language units, and the perceptive verbs, especially verbs of visual perception, can denote the subject s cognition as well as perception. Therefore the Russian verb of visual perception videt can be read not only as to see but also as to know . However not all the Russian verbal forms of visual perception act like a cognitive verb. To have a cognitive reading, the object of the perceptive verbs should not represent a concrete entity. It must be an abstract concept or a proposition from syntactic and semantic points of view. In other words, the object of the perceptive verbs must be a subordinate clause with chto or kak, or have a hidden proposition (for example My mozhem videt vosstanovlenie normal nogo processa). The Russian perceptive verb videt and a subordinate clause are connected to each other by a conjunction chto or kak. While the conjunction kak focuses on the dynamic process of the situation, chto -on the static mental image of the situation. Therefore the perceptive verb construction with kak has a purely perceptual reading, but the one with chto has a cognitive reading. That also explains why the verb smotret can have a subordinate clause with a conjuction kak, but not one with chto. The use of the perceptive verbs with a cognitive reading and the pure epistemic (or cognitive) verbs reflects the speaker s different interpretation of the subject s mental state. If the cognitive verb represents only a mental state, the perceptive verb with a cognitive reading represents the mental state acquired by visual observation, namely, the visual cognition.