O (a)symetrii semantycznej wzroku i słuchu .......... 41

ON SEMANTIC (A)SYMMETRY OF SIGHT AND HEARING

The author points out that although seeing and hearing are commonly perceived as equally important activities, and the lexical and semantic fields relating to sight and hearing, eye and ear, seeing and looking at, are largely symmetrical, at the same time 1/ more information about the world is acquired through the visual canal than through the auditory one, 2/ the quality of information transmitted through the visual and auditory routes is different. This is because the verbs of seeing combine sensory meanings (to see: ‘to perceive visual impressions’) with mental (to see: ‘to understand, imagine’) and psycho-social ones (to see: ‘to evaluate’), and the verbs of hearing integrate sensory meanings (to hear: ‘to perceive sound impressions’) with ethics (to listen to someone: ‘to act as someone wishes, according to the rules imposed’). This relationship between słuchanie (‘listening’) – and, respectively, preaching and speaking – and the sphere of ethics is linguistically established, for example in the etymology of such Polish words as słowo (‘word’), słuchać (‘listen’), posłuszny (‘obedient’), słuszny (‘right, correct’), słusznie (‘right, correctly’) or słuszność (‘right, righteousness’), and it has also been confirmed for centuries by the most important cultural texts of our civilization (the Bible).