The perspective of the other

Abstract

Abstract The central question of the paper is whether visual perception serves as a grounding cognitive act for experiencing and reflecting on the other in elegiac poetry. I assume that elegy has a cultural scheme in which the lyric subject can see the environment not only from his own point of view but also from the perspective of the other, and this mental contextualization has reoccurring linguistic patterns (e.g.,the expressions of retrospection/looking backwards, or looking to the natural environment from different points of view) in elegiac tradition. For testing the assumption, I use corpus-based analysing methods: in a quantitative analysis a specific research corpus is built from canonical Hungarian elegies, and it is analysed with Lancsbox with the aim of identifying the characteristic linguistic construction of visual perception. I explore the distribution and the collocational patterns of the Hungarian verbs lát ‘see’, néz ‘look’ and figyel ‘watch’ in the elegy corpus, and keyword analysis is made with the use of a reference corpus built from Hungarian odes.