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

4.1. Sweetser’s 
MIND
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 conceptual metaphor 
The fact that certain verbs of perception could refer to other non-physical 
meanings has been long established. In Bechtel’s (1879) study of the different meanings 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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that sense verbs can convey, he states that subjective perception expressions originated 
in the more objective sense expressions, which in turn have a more concrete origin, in 
the changes detected by the sensory impressions. Kurath (1921) notes how Indo-
European words for perception, those referring to physical actions accompanying the 
relevant emotions and those referring to the organs affected by those physical actions, 
developed into words for emotion. Buck (1949) devotes a whole section to the study of 
the etymological relations between Indo-European sense perception verbs. While these 
studies are more focused on the etymologies and different senses of these verbs without 
giving a specific theory of why they are related
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, Sweetser’s main aim is to provide a 
motivated
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explanation for the relationships between senses of a single morpheme or 
word and between diachronically earlier and later sense of a morpheme or word.
Sweetser proposes a semantic link-up that can account for this pervasive 
tendency in the Indo-European languages to borrow concepts and vocabulary from the 
more accessible physical and social world to refer to the less accessible worlds of 
reasoning, emotion and conversational structure; what she calls the 
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metaphor. This link-up between the vocabularies of the mind and body is not only rooted 
in some psychosomatic reactions (Kurath 1921). As Sweetser argues, in some examples 
psychosomatic explanations may be enough to account for some cases. For instance, the 
fact that it is possible to have emotional tension or to feel low may be linked to the 
muscular states of tension and limpness that go with these mental states. However, other 
expressions such as bitter anger or sweet revenge cannot be linked to any direct physical 
taste response of bitterness or sweetness, they should be regarded as metaphorical. 
This 
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metaphor is motivated by correspondences between our 
external experience and our internal emotional and cognitive states. These 
correspondences are not isolated; they are parts of a larger system. This metaphor 
involves our conceptualising one whole area of experience (i.e. mind) in terms of 
another (i.e. body), and therefore, Sweetser suggests that 
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can be 
considered as what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) regard as a ‘conceptual metaphor’. 
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Kurath attributes this diachronic development of emotion words to the psychosomatic nature of 
emotions. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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Another important point is that correspondences between these two domains of 
experience are unidirectional
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(Sweetser 1990: 30): from the vocabulary of bodily 
experience to the vocabulary of psychological states. In the case of English perception 
verbs, the metaphorical mappings take place between two domains of experience: the 
vocabulary of physical perception as the source domain and the vocabulary of the 
internal self and sensations as the target domain. Although, in most cases, the 
unidirectionality of this mapping is preserved, as we shall see later on in the discussion, 
there are some exceptions to this general tendency. 
With this 
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metaphor as a background, Sweetser goes on to analyse 
the routes into and out of the domain of physical perception. As explained in Chapter 3, 
this thesis is not focused on the historical development of the meanings of perception 
verbs, but on the present-day polysemous senses conveyed by these verbs. Nevertheless, 
I include here Sweetser’s description of the routes followed by perception verbs, not 
only to give a full overview of her approach, but also because as she states “through a 
historical analysis of ‘routes’ of semantic change, it is possible to elucidate synchronic 
connections between lexical domains” (1990: 45). The routes she maps out for English 
sense-perception verbs are sketched in Table 4.1: 
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By ‘motivated’ Sweetser understands “an account which appeals to something beyond the 
linguist’s intuition that these senses are related, or that these two senses are more closely related than 
either is to a third sense” (1990: 3). 
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Recent research within the Cognitive Linguistics framework, i.e. Fauconnier and Turner’s 
theory of ‘blending’ (Fauconnier 1997; Fauconnier and Turner 1994, 1996; Turner and Fauconnier 1995) 
and some related work on recursive metaphorical chains (see Rohrer 1997) seems to introduce a new 
perspective on this unidirectionality in metaphorical mappings. As Barcelona (1997: 13) suggests, “these 
studies point towards the existence of multiple projections, although not in the sense suggested by 
interactionalist theories of metaphor, such as Black’s (1962, 1993)”. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
SENSE 
SEMANTIC SOURCES 
TARGET DOMAIN 
VISION 
-Physical nature of sight: light (*leuk- 
‘light’), the eyes (Lger oegen ‘eyes’), 
facial movement… 
-Metaphors of vision: behold, catch sight 
of… < Lat –scipio ‘seize’, see < *sek