This essay introduces the first linguistic task of the DELIS project’: to undertake a corpus-based examination of the syntactic and semantic properties of perception vocabulary in five languages, English, Danish, Dutch, French and Italian. The theoretical background is Fillmore’s Frame Semantics. The paper reviews some of the variety of facts to be accounted for, particularly in the specialization of sense associated with some collocations, and the pervasive phenomenon of Intensionality. Through this review, we aim to focus our understanding of cross-linguistic variation in this one domain, both by noting specific differences in word-sense correlation, and by exhibiting a general means of representation.