From Vision to Discourse: The Grammaticalization of the Perception Verb Thấy in Vietnamese (13–20th C.)

This paper offers the first long-range account of the grammaticalization of the Vietnamese perception verb thấy ‘see’ from the 13th to the mid-20th century. Using a balanced diachronic corpus of ten representative texts (1345 tokens), we combine frequency profiling with constructional analysis to trace thấy’s shift from a literal visual predicate to a high-frequency resource for epistemic stance, evidentiality, evaluation, and discourse management. The results reveal a robust progression aligned with the sensory hierarchy and canonical event-schema pathways: early literal uses and multimodal bundling (13–14th c.) provide bridging contexts; the 15th century introduces raising (thấy + VP/Adj) and clausal complementation (thấy (rằng/là) + CP); the 16–17th centuries expand resultative perception complexes (e.g., xem/chiêm bao/nghe + thấy) and reportative frames; the 18th century brings evaluative and speaker-anchored uses (chúng tôi thấy); the 19–20th centuries stabilize discourse-pivot (thấy… thì…), epistemic (thấy cần phải…), and exclamative/affective (thấy ghét) readings. We argue that Vietnamese clause-linking options and optional complementizers facilitate constructionalization via loose complementation and subjectification, while retaining perceptual residues that motivate evidential and interactional meanings. The study contributes: (i) a comprehensive diachrony of thấy; (ii) diagnostics separating perceptual, experiential, propositional, and discourse layers; and (iii) a case study bearing on the relationship between grammaticalization and constructional change in an isolating language.