The paper refers to the ways of categorizing the five senses, i.e. sight, hearing, smell, taste, and the tactile sense, as they are represented in the Slavic languages. The case of perception involves several participants and several ways of perception: 1) active perception, which is an action in itself (смотреть ‘to look’, слушать ‘to listen’, нюхать ‘to smell, to recognize smell’, пробовать на вкус ‘to taste, to experience the flavor of food or drink’, щупать ‘to touch’); 2) passive perception, which in itself is a condition (видеть ‘to see’, слышать ‘to hear’, ощущать запах ‘to smell, be able to smell things’, чувствовать вкус ‘to taste, be able to experience the flavor of food or drink’, осязать ‘to feel’); 3) a perceptive (eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue); 4) a percept (appearance, sound, smell, taste, texture); 5) perceptive predicates (qualities, capabilities) (выглядеть ‘to seem’, звучать ‘to sound’, пахнуть ‘to smell, to have a particular smell’, иметь вкус ‘to taste, to have a particular flavor’, иметь фактуру ‘to feel, to have a particular texture’). Whilst in some cases of perception the language contains the vocabulary to describe most – if not all – components of the situation, in other cases it demonstrates the lack of certain words. The only sense that is characterized with a complete paradigm is the sense of hearing (to listen, to hear, listener, sound, to sound) with *čuti and its derivates being able to have a general meaning of perception in itself; on the contrary, the vocabulary related to the sense of taste turns out to be the poorest. On the one hand, the vocabulary of physical perception is universally tied to the lexis of emotions (e.g. чувство любви ‘feeling of love’, чувство отчаяния ‘feeling of despair’, чувство долга ‘sense of duty’ etc); on the other hand, it is connected with the “mental” vocabulary (i.e. to see ‘to understand’, ‘to be conscious of’, ‘to think’ etc.). This fact can be interpreted as an attempt to express the “continuity” of the human inner world; the non-strict discretization of certain ways of perception and delimited sensual, emotional, and mental areas by means of the language.
