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

txesta-. Finally, in the Roncalese dialect there is the variant testatu. 
The sense of taste in Spanish is quite unique because it has kept the two verbs 
that were used in Latin for this sense with the same main meanings. In the first place, 
there is saber. It comes from Latin sapere, which meant ‘to taste’ and ‘to be wise, to 
know’. This verb replaced Latin scire in all Romance languages, except in Romanian 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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and Sardinian. The meaning of ‘to have a taste’ is only preserved in Italian and in the 
Iberian Romances, whereas in Modern French, for example savoir (< Lat sapere) only 
means ‘to know’; some reminiscences of its etymological meaning can be seen in the 
noun saveur (< Lat sapor) which means ‘savour, taste’. The fact that these two different 
domains, the perception of tastes and knowledge, are present in the same word, is what 
makes Sweetser state that “the sense of taste is here evidently connected not merely with 
general experience or perception, but with mental experience” (1990:37). Although it is 
true that the sense of taste is linked to the mental domain, I find it very difficult to accept 
this assertion on the basis that in Latin these two meanings were lexicalised by the same 
verb. This only happens in Latin and later, in Spanish, but in neither of the other 
languages of the sample. It is true that the words that we have been discussing here so 
far, Basque dastatu and English taste, are not original words from those languages but 
loans from other languages, i.e. Romance, but it is very strange that these words have 
not developed such a meaning. If it is true that these semantic changes from the concrete 
domain to the abstract domain are cross-linguistic and not language specific, we cannot 
make such a generalisation that the sense of taste is linked to the mental domain only on 
the basis of this case in Latin, because if it is not shared by other languages, it means 
that it is just a particular fact of Latin and its descendants.
Saber is found in Spanish right from its origins (Glosas (10
th
ct.), Cid (12
th
ct.)), 
and since then it has developed the meanings it inherited from Latin
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. In the sense of ‘to 
know’, saber now also means ‘to realise’, ‘to find out’, ‘to hear about’ and ‘to be able 
to’. This last meaning is very important because in these cases saber behaves like a 
modal verb. It requires the construction saber + infinitive, as in (1): 
(1)
María sabe / 
no 
sabe
nadar 
mary knows 
/ 
no 
knows 
swim 
‘Mary can/can’t swim’
This could be considered a case of grammaticalisation, because the verb has lost 
part of its lexical meaning to become a kind of function word (Hopper and Traugott 
1993). 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
104
Gustar is the other main verb of the sense of taste in Spanish. It comes from 
Latin gustâre ‘to taste’. In Berceo (13
th
ct.) this verb appears as gostar, but gustar is the 
standard form since the end of the 15
th
ct. The development of the syntax of this verb is 
very interesting. In the Middle Ages gustar was used transitively, with the person who 
tasted as the subject. In the Renaissance (Spanish Golden Age in Literature) the 
intransitive construction gustar de algo (lit. ‘like of something’) was quite frequent. The 
subject was the person who performed the action. Together with this syntactic 
development, there is also a shift in the meaning from the neutral ‘to taste’ (as an 
experiencer-based verb) to ‘to take pleasure’ to the current usage ‘to like, to enjoy’
97
. 
These developments can be represented as follows: 
Middle 
Ages 
Renaissance 
Nowadays 
transitive 
→→ intransitive
→→ intransitive 
subject:agent 
subject:agent 
subject:experiencer 
‘taste’ 
‘taste, 
enjoy’ 
‘enjoy, 
like’ 
Saber and gustar are distinguished by Roque-Barcía (1902) on the basis of 
sensibility. According to this author gustar refers to the action of the gustative organs, 
whereas saber refers to the pleasure or pain that we feel, when we taste. It is related to 
sensibility. Gustar seems to be a condition for saber, because without gustar something 
one cannot saborear it (see Section 2.3.5).