Seeing through other eyes: A cognitive-contrastive study of the Chinese perceptual marker Zhĭjiàn and its English correspondences in written narratives

Through a corpus‑based comparison of the Chinese viewpoint‑marking construction zhĭjiàn (只见) and its English correspondences in written narratives, this study posits a cross‑linguistic distinction in event construal preference between the two languages. Employing the three‑dimensional intersubjectivity framework, we first delineate a functional spectrum of zhĭjiàn and categorize it into three variants, thereby situating narrative events along the third‑party axis that connects narrator and character perspectives to the communicative ground. Subsequently, a probabilistic mapping based on a bidirectional parallel corpus reveals a consistent, yet divergent construal pattern in English, characterized by the use of visual predicates, logical‑temporal connectives, or zero marking, rather than a dedicated perceptual marker. A further analysis shows that Chinese narratives tend to employ embodied grounding strategies for immersive, subject-oriented representation, whereas the corresponding constructions in English are more detached and exhibit a preference for object-centered reportage. These findings collectively underscore how language‑specific resources coordinate perspectives from within and beyond the communicative ground. We thus propose that the translation asymmetry observed for zhĭjiàn in literary narratives lies in the deep divergences between the two languages in their perspectivization and contextualization mechanisms.