Sensory verbs: SEE vs. LOOK AT vs. LOOK vs. WATCH

THREE TYPES OF SENSORY VERBS
Sensory verbs come in several different varieties:

1. Sensing: see, hear, feel, taste, smell
2. Attending: look at, listen to, touch, taste, smell/sniff
3. Perceiving: look, sound, feel, taste, smell

We use the first type to talk about receiving sensory information and the second type when the observer is deliberately directing their senses to attend to something. For example, to look at is to direct one's eyes to see something, to listen to is to direct one's auditory attention to hear something, to touch is to direct one's hand to feel something, and so on.

The third type of sensory verb is used to talk about the state or qualities of perceived objects. Grammatically, this third type is part of a small group of verbs (which also includes be and seem) that can take an adjective as a complement:

• It is/seems nice.
• It looks/sounds/feels/tastes/smells nice.

A FOURTH TYPE
There is also a fourth type of sensory verb, which we can think of as a refinement of the second type. The only difference is in the form of the verb for vision to give us watch instead of look at. Both watching and looking at are about focussing one's visual attention so as to see something, but watching involves not only attending to the form of objects but also to changes that occur in them over time. Hence we watch a movie but normally only look at a photograph.

Note that watching isn't merely looking continuously as is often claimed because a person can look at something continuously without attending to changes in it. Consider the following pair of sentences, for example:

• Jill watched television for an hour.
• Jill looked at the television for an hour.

Both of these sentences are perfectly acceptable in English, but they mean different things. The first is the more typical case that would apply if Jill were enjoying a television program. The second is a strange thing to do for a whole hour since it would suggest that Jill paid no attention to the changing images on the screen or that the television wasn't even switched on.