The topic of this paper is the syntactic-semantic description of perception verbs in the Croatian language, and theoretical assumptions based on the principles of cognitive-linguistic approaches to grammatical description, especially on Ronald Langacker's cognitive grammar (1987, 1991, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2013, etc.) as a central theory. One of the basic ideas of cognitive-linguistic approaches to grammatical description is generally the idea of embodiment, i.e. the idea that the way we interact with the world around us affects the way we construct and understand meanings. Meaning is conceptualisation, and that conceptualisation can include all sorts of physical and non-physical entities, the material world, and sensory, kinaesthetic, intellectual, emotional, and other mental experiences. Meanings therefore do not exist per se, but include the speaker’s entire knowledge, linguistic and encyclopaedic, based on human cognitive abilities. Since we establish contact between our own physical body and the world around us through the senses, and we process the information we receive and give meaning to it through different mental cognitive abilities, then one of the goals of any grammatical description must be to describe and understand the cognitive processes involved in the linguistic construction of a particular experience. Namely, many phenomena that are observable in various aspects of cognition are manifested in language, and language uses and expresses them in its own manner and in its own organisation. Linguistic meaning is found in conceptualisation which is described as dynamic, interactive, pictorial (opposite to propositional) and imaginative (includes phenomena such as metaphor, metonymy, conceptual integration, imagination, etc.). However, it is not possible to describe the conceptual structure explicitly and in detail applying these general features, therefore certain notions and concepts are proposed within cognitive grammar. Broadly, meaning consists of certain content and a certain way of construing that content. The term construal or manner of construing meaning therefore refers to our obvious ability to imagine and portray a particular situation in many different ways. The terms Langacker uses to describe a large group of different procedures for construing meaning or construal operations are specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective, each of which implies different mental, cognitive processes such as categorisation, association, schematisation, etc., which are closely related to various perceptual modalities, especially the visual and the way we use the sensory organs to experience the world around us and the information we collect about it, which are an important part of the methodological system in this paper. Another theoretical structure that this paper follows is the idea that grammar is not a separate, self-sufficient, formal system, but forms a continuum with semantics, has its meaning and reflects our basic experiences with the world around us. The central idea of cognitive grammar is that language is essentially symbolic. Langacker reduces both lexicon and grammar to "bipolar" symbolic units whose one pole is defined by the semantic and the other by the phonological unit, emphasising the semiological and interactive functions of language as fundamental. Verbs of perception, which are the main subject of this paper, encode experiences about the world that we reach through the body, i.e. the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and we use these immediate bodily experiences to understand and articulate much more complex, abstract ideas, like emotions and other entities of our inner, intangible world. Hence, they are a deep source of figurative expression, resulting in their prominent polysemy, realised in language through various syntactic structures. Therefore, we will pay particular attention to the analysis of cognitive processes involved in the construction of different meanings and the use of sensory verbs in everyday speech, both in their prototypical and non-prototypical meanings. An important question is how the meanings of other elements in a sentence affect the overall meaning, i.e. whether different meanings of perception verbs arise from the verb itself or from the interaction of its meaning with the meaning of its arguments and to what extent the semantic structure of verbs affects various syntactic environments in which verbs occur. The focus will therefore be not only on the verbs themselves, but on the higher-order constructions in which they appear. Based on this, the descriptions and analyses in this paper will be usage-based and organised according to the context in which perception verbs appear, while the meaning is understood as a conceptual category with an encyclopaedic background. Since cognitive grammar, as previously mentioned, is a model of language description based on use, in the analysis of perception verbs we will mostly refer to online language databases such as hrWaC, Hrvatski nacionalni korpus, Hrvatska jezična riznica, Hrvatski jezični portal and the lexicographic sources. Also, some conventional and well-known constructions from everyday colloquial speech will be cited. We will focus on the meanings that perception verbs convey in different constructions, on the cognitive mechanisms behind those meanings that affect the syntactic environments in which perception verbs are used, and on the event structure of the constructions in which they occur. Although there are numerous international professional papers and scientific studies that deal with perception verbs, especially those of sight, they have not yet been sufficiently explained and still pose a challenge, while Croatian studies and papers on the topic are scarce. PAPER STRUCTURE: As already mentioned, this paper deals with the syntactic-semantic description of perception verbs in the Croatian language, and the theoretical settings rely on the principles of cognitive-linguistic approaches to grammatical description, especially Ronald Langacker's cognitive grammar as the central theory, which means that we will try to clarify the relationship between the meanings of perception verbs, the syntactic structures in which they participate, our own perception of human sense organs and the way we use them, their capabilities and limitations, and the various cognitive mechanisms from which language is inseparable. In the first chapter, we briefly present the theoretical and methodological framework and the research goals and hypotheses that we hope to explain. Since in this paper we talk about perception verbs primarily from the perspective of cognitive grammar, the second chapter is dedicated to cognitive grammar as the central theory on which this paper is based. One of the fundamental assertions of cognitive grammar is that of the inseparability of meaning and grammar, which it reduces to structuring and symbolising conceptual content, and therefore, unlike the generative approach, grammatical structures have no autonomous status. This, from the perspective of formal approaches to grammatical description, controversial attitude is psychologically justified and is natural from the perspective of the fundamental semiological function of language, and that is the symbolisation of conceptualisations using phonological sequences (Langacker 1999: 1). Language at all its levels compresses semantic structures, phonological structures, and symbolic connections between them, and this is all, according to Langacker, we need to describe language. The lexis is a set of fixed expressions of a certain language or lexical units, and they represent an extract of common human experience and unite everything that is perceived as common in form and meaning in a number of events of language use (Langacker 1999: 2). Concepts that achieve the status of lexical meanings are psychologically justified and cognitively emphasised, and their appearance through social interaction indicates their communicative usefulness in describing shared experiences, and, on an even more fundamental level, the basic cognitive abilities that support and shape that experience (Langacker 1999: 2). All cognitive abilities, from basic and to higher levels, such as the experience of different colours, sounds, tastes, smells and tactile sensations, experiences of space, emotions, etc., and the human ability to compare, categorise, focus, structure and understand scenes using a concept of the figure and the background, abstractions, etc., are related to human senses, especially the sense of sight, and for this reason perception verbs are an extremely interesting and valuable source of information about the relationship between language and cognition. In the third chapter, we briefly describe some of the most important past research projects on perception verbs, such as Ake Viberg's typological studies (1983, 1984), Ewe Sweetser's (1990, 1984) polysemy of perception verbs in English, or Ibarretxe-Antunano's (1999) study of perception verbs in English, Spanish and Basque languages and that, besides sight and hearing, studies in more detail the meanings of verbs arising from the senses of smell, taste and touch, which are often marginalised in linguistic discussions. If the assumption about embodied language is correct, and we believe that it is, then we can assume that semantic extensions, i.e. different meanings arising from perception verbs and the very syntactic structure or construction in which we use them, are motivated by and based on, among other things, manner we use, perceive and experience our own sense organs and by the idea of their capacities and the way they function. In other words, in order to understand the conceptual basis of semantic extensions of individual perception verbs, their temporal semantic features and the event structure of constructions in which they participate, it is important to pay attention to their biological basis, i.e. physiology of perception organs, and psychology of senses, and to study the conception about the world around them people have, their role in it and how they actually use their own senses to gather information, i.e. how they themselves see and understand the process of perception (see Classen 1993, Sekuler and Blake 1994, Howes 2005, Rouby et al. 2002, Ibarretxe-Antunano 2008). An important source of inspiration for cognitive approaches to language was therefore research projects in the fields of neurology, psychology, biology, anthropology, etc., especially those related to human ability to categorise and research within Gestalt psychology (German gestalt) from the early 20th century. Gestalt psychology has defined a number of principles on which the human perception of the various entities and organisations of the world around us is based, and these principles, such as the principle of figure and ground, the principle of grouping by proximity, the principle of grouping by similarity, etc., are universal, also in the way we speak and are generally accepted in cognitive linguistics. In the fourth chapter, therefore, we briefly explain the relationship between cognition, perception, senses, stimuli and sensations; we describe the physiology of five different sense organs and the way in which people themselves perceive different perceptual processes. In the same chapter, we briefly describe the main principles of Gestalt psychology. In the fifth chapter we deal with the analysis of prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of perception verbs in the Croatian language. In accordance with cognitive- grammatical views on semantics, lexical units, which are used often enough, are always polysemous, i.e. they have different interconnected meanings that are conventionalised to a greater or lesser extent. Some of these meanings are central, i.e. prototypical or closer to the semantic centre, and some are further from that centre and have non-prototypical meanings. In the analysis, we started from their basic physical meanings and dictionary definitions, and then we analysed their non-prototypical, extended meanings, namely extended physical, which are elaborations of basic physical meanings, and metaphorical, which are extensions of basic physical meanings. Firstly, we were interested in what meanings of selected perception verbs are stated in Croatian language dictionaries, and for this purpose we studied the Croatian language portal and singled out the meanings of verbs gledati, izgledati, vidjeti, slušati, čuti, zvučati, mirisati, namirisati, njušiti, nanjušiti, kušati, okusiti, dirati, dodirnuti, pipati i napipati (watch, seem, see, listen, hear, sound, smell, sniff, taste, touch, and feel), which we consider to be the basic verbs of perception in the Croatian language, and this is indicated by hrWaC and the Croatian Frequency Dictionary (Moguš et al. 1999), in which these verbs are the most frequent representatives of their classification group, i.e. a certain perception modality, and this also indicates their cognitive prominence. We also believe that these verbs are the most neutral in relation to the manner of performing the action, unlike verbs like pogledavati, zagledati se, počuti, zamirisati (look, stare, hear, smell) etc., which not only indicate the sense from which they originate but also, for example, the manner and speed with which the perceptual action happens. Since perception verbs are one of the most important sources of evidentiality and epistemicity, in the context of extended, metaphorical meanings, we also considered the meanings of perception verbs, especially those of sight and hearing, in relation to these two categories, and then singled out all extended physical and metaphorical meanings that we found in constructions with different perception verbs excerpted from hrWaC and HNK and analysed in which and what semantic fields individual perception verbs spread. The meanings of perception verbs vary along two basic parameters: in relation to the 5 perception modalities or type of perception, and the semantic role of the subject, i.e. the agentivity of the experiencer. One of the fundamental classifications of perception verbs in the scientific and professional literature is precisely that of the semantic role of the subject. In the sixth chapter we therefore analyse perception verbs, i.e. constructions in which they participate, according to the semantic role of the subject, which, within the canonical event model in cognitive grammar has one of two archetypal roles, that of the agent, while the direct object prototypically assumes the role of the patient. Since the subjects of perception verbs are not prototypical agents, nor are their objects, i.e. sources of stimuli or stimuli prototype patients, in this chapter we investigate how the subjects of different perception verbs or experiencers are positioned in relation to the canonical event model and prototype semantic roles and we analyse the nature of relationships which the experiencing subject establishes with the object of perception. On that basis we establish the basic paradigm of perception verbs in the Croatian language with regard to the semantic role of the subject experiencer in constructions with perception verbs. In addition to the characteristics of the subject of construction, as the cognitively most prominent participant in an energetic situation and the initiator of energy flow, the transitivity of the construction is closely related, so we deal with it in the seventh chapter of this paper. Transitivity is a grammatical category that is related to the lexical-grammatical properties of a verb as a part of predicate and its ability to manage its complements in some oblique case. In its prototypical form, transitivity is a linguistic reflection of our fundamental notion of how the most diverse entities interact energetically in the real world, and Langacker illustrates it with a billiard ball model. The billiard ball model, together with the stage model and the semantic role model constitute the canonical event model. The canonical event model also includes two archetypal roles, namely the roles of agent and patient. The concept of transitivity includes several different parameters, and all mirror some aspect of the canonical event model (Rice 1987, according to Langacker 1999: 25). When a canonical event is linguistically coded in a maximally neutral way, the head of the clause is a verb that establishes a dynamic relationship between the agent and the patient, that is, the subject and the direct object, with a one-way flow of energy. The Croatian language expresses perceptual experiences in transitive sentences, which are an extension in relation to the prototype, which includes the relationship between the agent and the patient. This extension is motivated by similarities on an abstract level between the energy transfer initiated by the agent in the energy transfer chain from the source to the target, i.e., the patient on the one side and the imagined mental path leading from a more active experiencer to a more passive object of perception on the other . The degree of transitivity of a verb, i.e. a construction with a certain verb, has its semantic and synthetic implications, and is examined by the possibility of establishing a passive correlate, whose validity indicates the importance of the effect that a process marked by a verb achieves on an entity in the target domain of energy transfer. The abstract, metaphorical change that the object of perception or of some other mental experience goes through is a metaphorical extension of the actual physical change that the prototype patient goes through in the canonical event model. In the seventh chapter, from a cognitive-grammatical perspective, we analyse how and to what extent the canonical event model and prototypical semantic roles of agent and patient are mirrored in constructions with perception verbs. The eighth chapter deals with constructions with inverted perception verbs in which the grammatical subject is actually the source of various perception stimuli, while the logical subject - the experiencer - remains unstated, so they form a special group of perception verbs. Constructions with inverted perception verbs provide interesting insights into language theory based on the use and the influence of language assumption on language constructions, which cognitive grammar consistently emphasises, but it is also a topic in many theories of subject alignment and have a special event structure. In the seventh and ninth chapters we analyse how the canonical event model, i.e. our basic idea of energy distribution and flow between participants of a certain dynamic situation, which we encode in prototypes with a transitive construction, is reflected on the semantics and syntax of constructions with perception verbs. In cognitive grammar, verbs are defined as temporal relational predictions, so, besides the energy that is always contained in the meaning of the verb and whose distribution in the energy flow chain we analysed using the concept of transitivity, we must also analyse the temporal component, i.e. the distribution of different temporal semantic features that are equally inherent to verbs and to the situations that we encode with them. After all, the very conceptualisation of a verb, as a relational predication of a positive time profile or process, takes place by means of a cognitive operation of sequential observation, i.e. the ability to follow the development of a situation through a certain period of time. On the other hand, there is conceived time that relates to time as an object of conception, and it is most objectively constructed when the period of time is explicitly stated, for example, by expressions such as trenutak, tjedan, prošla godina, sljedeći mjesec (moment, week, last year, next month) etc. However, time as an object of conceptualisation always appears when an event is conceptualised because events, as we have said, always take place in time and it does not only refer to whether a situation is conceptualised as past, present or future or constructed as finished or progressive, but it covers a much wider area, which is important to explore in more detail because only in this way can the true nature of verbs be understood more broadly and deeply. In the ninth chapter, therefore, we analyse the event structure or aktionsart of perception verbs, that is, the constructions with perception verbs. Aktionsart of verbs includes various semantic temporal features such as fluency, punctuality, dynamism, homogeneity, etc. and refers to the temporal potential of verbs and the type of situation they are able to describe, which is expressed only at the construction level in relation to other parts of the sentence and expresses our basic notions of how events encoded by different verbs take place in the extra- linguistic world. The analysis of aktionsart of perception verbs is an extremely demanding task, especially when it comes to the so-called passive perception verbs like vidjeti and čuti (see and hear) that express a certain amorphousness when it comes to semantic temporal features, and it is possible to determine them only at the level of construction. Aktionsart of perception verbs were analysed on the examples of sentences excerpted from hrWaC, the Croatian National Corpus and through a web search. We first analysed their actionality in relation to their physical meanings, and then in relation to their extended physical and metaphorical meanings. In the last chapter, we bring the most important insights into the syntactic and semantic structure of perception verbs in the Croatian language and ask questions and guidelines for further research, which are motivated by the ideas developed in this paper.