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The article starts with a brief review of current studies of perception verbs as a background to the major part of the paper, which is devoted to a discussion of Phenomenon-based perception verbs. Three broad types are distinguished: sensory copulas, perceptibility verbs and sensory verbs. Verbs of these types appear across the five sense modalities. The categorization is tested on data from a translation corpus consisting of Swedish original novels translated into English, German, French and Finnish. The paper focuses on vision and audition, in particular the Swedish sensory copula verbs se ut “look” (e.g. “look happy”) and låta “sound” and their translations. In the prototypical meaning, these verbs combine the reference to a sense modality with a modal or evidential component (roughly: SEEM). One of these components can be bleached to various degrees depending on the grammatical context. It turns out that French to a much greater extent than the other languages uses verbs that are unmarked for the sense modality. The place of the result within a general typological framework is briefly discussed. Perceptual verbs referring to an Experience such as see and hear follow a universal lexicalization hierarchy, whereas the structuring of Phenomenon-based verbs is typologically variable.