Abstract

The German perception verb spüren („feel“), patterning with other perception verbs such as sehen („see“) or hören („hear“), exhibits various kinds of complement type to be selected. In this paper, I exploit a type-based compositional semantics in Asher (2011) to account for these cases. I propose a unified lexicon entry for spüren, which captures three essential semantic properties: First, the direct target of spüren are either special tropes (Moltmann, 2007, 2013) which are considered as concrete manifestations of a particular property associated with sensorial stimuli (r-TRO, e. g., bitterness, warmness), or events which can trigger tactile stimuli (t-EVT, e. g., earthquake, vibration). Second, the process of spüren always depends on the epistemic state of the subject of perception. Third, spüren involves an evidence-relation indicating that its target property should be an accessible evidence for the experiencer’s identifying it or inferring something through it. In case of spüren, two kinds of perception should be distinguished: The direct perception based on sensorially triggered evidence, and the indirect perception representing an inference-based and cognitive process. Formally, the former is reflected in the regular composition, while in the latter case coercion is interpolated.