Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a cross-linguistic study

Ukitu is the verb used in Standard Basque. In some of the examples discussed in this section, 
the verb ikutu is also used. This is a variant in the Guipuzcoan and Biscayan dialects. 
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Another extended physical meaning is ‘to be adjacent to’ as in The two houses touch, but as 
this is an extended percept meaning it will not be included here. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
70
your money. Although this proposal is sensible to some extent, I have decided to reject it 
and keep the former meaning for two reasons. First, because several dictionaries I have 
consulted (cf. AMGD, AM, COL) contain this entry as a separate one. Second, because I 
do not think these two sentences imply exactly the same meaning. In my opinion, the 
inferences resulting from the two examples are different. A sentence like John hardly 
touched the food can only make reference to one action ‘to eat’ (or ‘to drink’ if we 
change the direct object for a drink), and the verb to touch can be replaced by the verb to 
taste. In the second sentence, the verb to touch is not related to the meaning ‘to eat’ (or 
‘to drink’) and therefore, this substitution for to taste is not possible. Here the meaning 
refers more to the fact that I have not taken any money from that person, where ‘taken’ 
can be understood as the ‘physical action of grabbing sth.’, but also as ‘to steal’ it. 
Although not everybody would comply with my intuitions, I think it will be safer for the 
time being to keep the entry provided by the dictionaries rather than to propose a more 
general one. 
Another physical meaning is ‘to affect’ as in (80), (82) and (83). 
(80) Just 
don’t 
touch anything in my room (
AM
) 
(81) 
Nork
ukitu nau, nork
ukitu ditu
nire 
soinekoak? 
who.
ERG
touch
AUX
who.
ERG
touch
AUX
my
dress.
ABS
.
PL
‘Who touched me, who touched my dresses?’ (
IS
) 
(82) 
¿ Quién
ha
tocado mis
vestidos? 
Who
has
touched my
dresses 
‘Who touched my dresses?’ 
These three examples imply that not only has physical contact occurred, but there 
has also been a change of state. In (81), the person who utters this sentence does not 
want the other person to change anything in his/her room, whereas in both (82) and (83), 
the person is asking about the person who did change the position of the dresses from 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
71
the place they were before. This meaning, which I term ‘to affect’, has also a 
metaphorical extension as we shall see below. 
As far as metaphorical meanings are concerned there are four meanings ‘to 
affect’, ‘to reach’ and ‘to deal with’.
We have already seen that ‘to affect’ can be understood physically as in (81), 
(82) and (83), but it also has a metaphorical interpretation as in the examples below. 
(84) 
An appeal that touches us deeply (
AM
) 
(85) Edertasunak 
ukitu du
azkenean
Iñakiren
bihotz 
gogorra 
beauty.
ERG
touch 
AUX
end.
INE
iñaki.
GEN
heart 
strong.
ABS
‘In the end, beauty changed Iñaki’s hard feelings’ (
IS
) 
(86) 
Juan le
tocó el
corazón
a
María 
john 
she.
DAT
touched the
heart
to
mary 
‘John touched Mary’s heart’ (
CSE
) 
In these examples what is affected is the emotional side of the person in question. 
In (84) the appeal was very emotive to us; we could not remain with the same feelings or 
ideas that we had before hearing it. In (85) Iñaki’s feelings are changed too, as a result of 
the beauty that he saw in a person or thing. Finally in (86) John also affected, i.e. 
changed, Mary’s feelings
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. Although the emotional perspective of touch has been seen 
as an independent metaphorical mapping (Sweetser 1990: 37/43), I would like to include 
it as part of this wider meaning domain ‘to affect’. There are other examples in these 
languages where we have the same ‘contact-to-effect’ chain and that can also be 
included under this label. For instance, in Basque there is the expression ardoa ukitu, lit. 
‘touch wine’, which means that the wine is spoilt and can no longer be drunk. In 
Spanish, when a person wins the lottery it is very common to say Me tocó la lotería, lit. 
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In this example, we have a further metaphor in the case of heart. According to Lakoff and 
Johnson’s (1980) theory, heart is not a physical object, but a metaphorical realisation of the image schema 
of a container, where 
HEART IS A CONTAINER FOR FEELINGS
. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
72
‘the lottery touched me’, in which case the lottery is the agent that provokes the change 
in me, that is to say I became rich. 
Following recent theoretical developments in the Cognitive Semantics 
framework (Radden, in press; Barcelona, in press b, among others), it could be argued 
that this metaphorical extension 
TOUCH
Æ 
AFFECT
(
NON
-
PHYSICALLY
) has a metonymic 
basis. This metaphor
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could be based on the metonymic understanding of 
CAUSED 
PHYSICAL CHANGE
(i.e. 
AFFECT
) as touching, which is added to the metaphorical 
mapping 
ABSTRACT CHANGE IS AS PHYSICAL CHANGE
. The possibility of explaining not 
only this semantic extension but also a few others in this chapter
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by means of 
metonymy, is an interesting alternative that I will not be able to pursue in this thesis for 
two reasons. First, the fact that metonymy is not a clear-cut concept yet in Cognitive 
Semantics. Most cognitive linguists view metonymy as the mapping that takes place 
within the same conceptual domain, but there is still disagreement on its referential 
character and on the domains which could be the target of these metonymic mappings 
(see Barcelona, in press c). Second, the fact that many of these studies were not 
available in press at the time when I was developing this thesis. However, I would like 
to point out that the metonymic basis of perception metaphors, as well as the relationship 
between metonymy as a cognitive device and the theoretical hypothesis put forward in 
the following chapters, are areas that I would like to investigate in future research. 
Another meaning is ‘to reach’ as in (87), (88) and (89) below. 
(87) He