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

6.2. PROPERTY SELECTION PROCESSES in touch and smell. 
In Chapter 2 the main cross-linguistic meanings of the five perception modalities 
have been analysed. These meanings are divided into two categories: on the one hand, 
the so-called ‘prototypical’ meanings, i.e. those meanings that refer to physical 
perception through these senses; on the other, the ‘non-prototypical’ meanings, i.e. 
extended meanings, physical and non-physical, conveyed by perception verbs. 
Prototypical meanings are classified into three groups according to the semantic role of 
the arguments that these verbs take. These groups are experience (animate experiencer 
subject), activity (animate active subject) and percept (experienced entity as subject)
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. 
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Later in the discussion of smell verbs, the property  is used to explain these 
differences between experience, active and percept verbs. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
166
Non-prototypical extended meanings in tactile verbs are ‘to partake of food/drink’, ‘to 
affect’, ‘to reach’, and ‘to deal with’. Non-prototypical meanings in olfactory verbs are 
‘to trail something’, ‘to guess’, ‘to suspect’ and ‘to investigate’. 
In Chapter 5, a typology of the properties that characterise the senses was 
presented. The properties in touch and smell are summarised in Table 6.1. These 
properties are called prototypical because they describe how we think that we perceive 
through these senses, which is, in turn, the bodily and cultural basis for the physical 
prototypical meanings of these sense verbs. 
PROPERTIES IN TOUCH 
PROPERTIES IN SMELL 
yes
> no
> 
yes
> yes
> 
no
> yes
> 
yes
> yes
> 
yes
>
yes
> yes
> 
yes
> no
> 
yes
> no
> 
yes
>
yes
>
of 
hypothesis 
yes
> 
yes
> 
Table 6.1: Prototypical properties in touch and smell 
I have already presented the extended meanings of these tactile and olfactory 
verbs, and characterised the source domain in terms of properties that show us the bodily 
basis for these mappings between different conceptual domains. The next issue is to 
determine how much and what part of the source domain is actually transferred onto the 
target domain, that is to say what constrains the mappings between target and source 
domains. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
167