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

6.2.3. PROPERTY SELECTION PROCESSES IN SMELL 
Two of the extended meanings of olfactory verbs are ‘to trail something’ and ‘to 
investigate’ illustrated below in (17) and (18). The properties selected in these meanings 
are yes
> and yes
>.
(17) 
The dog was sniffing the ground looking for the hare 
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Chapter 7 is devoted to the explanation of how the semantic content of different co-occurring 
lexical items takes part in the creation of the meaning of the sentence. 
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As in the case of (14), it is argued that this property is also implied by the use of the adverb 
hardly. The issue of how other words in the sentence help identify which properties are selected is 
discussed in Chapter 7. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
173
(18) The 
police 
have 
been 
sniffing around here again 
These meanings select the property yes
> because the dog in (17) and 
the police in (18) are trying to detect those hints that would lead then to find what they 
are looking for. The property yes
> is selected because this search is carried 
out consciously, both the dog and the police are active subjects of the action of smell. It 
is important to recall that the default value of this property in the sense of smell as 
explained in Section 5.2.1 (ii) is negative. This value is reversed in this meaning because 
the act of smell is no longer unconscious, but premeditated by the active subject. In 
Chapter 2, I discussed the differences between agential and non-agential subjects. 
Perception verbs were classified according to the semantic role of their subjects into 
three groups: ‘experience’ (the subject does not consciously control the stimuli; it refers 
to a state or inchoative achievement), ‘activity’ (unbounded process consciously 
controlled by a human agent), and ‘percept’ (subjects are the stimuli of the perception) 
(See Section 2.2). The property  can be applied to these three groups. 
Experience and percept would have a negative value attached to this property, 
no
>; activity like examples (17) and (18) in this discussion a positive value 
instead, yes
>. The only difference in these two sentences is that in (17) the 
action of smell is a physical one, where the dog is actually using its nose in order to 
follow the trail left by the hare, whereas in (18), the police are not smelling physically, 
but metaphorically. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
Prototypical 
physical
meanings 
Property selected 
physical
meaning 
no
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
no
> 
yes
> / 
no
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
Property Selection Process 
Figure 6.3: Property Selection Processes in (17) ‘to trail something’. 
As in ‘to affect, physically’ in Section 6.2.2, in the case of the extended meaning 
in (17), only Property Selection Processes take part in the extension of this meaning. 
This selection of properties from the source domain onto the target domain not only 
shows what part of the source domain is transferred in this mapping, but it also explains 
the extension of meaning from the prototypical physical meaning ‘to smell physically’ to 
the extended physical meaning ‘to trail something’. 
Property Selection Processes in (17) are represented in Figure 6.3 above. 
However, in (18) ‘to investigate’ (cf. example (12) ‘to affect, non-physically’), 
not only Property Selection, but also metaphorical processes take place. That is why the 
meaning is no longer concrete but abstract. Both processes are represented in Figure 6.4. 
As was pointed out in the discussion of ‘to affect’ in the previous section, it is 
important to take into account the fact that the extended metaphorical meaning ‘to 
investigate’ comes from the first prototypical meaning ‘to perceive by smell’ and not 
from the extended physical meaning ‘to trail something’. Otherwise it will be implied 
that every metaphorical meaning needs to have a physical counterpart. This assumption 
is wrong. Metaphorical extended meanings such as ‘to suspect’ and ‘to guess’ do not 
have an extended physical meaning counterpart. The only difference among these 
meanings lies in properties selected for these meanings. 
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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
Prototypical 
physical
meanings 
Property selected 
metaphorical 
abstract 
meaning 
no
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
no
> 
yes
> / 
no
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
yes
> 
Property Selection 
Metaphor 
Figure 6.4: Property selection and metaphorical processes in (18) ‘to investigate’. 
The properties that explain the extended meanings ‘to guess’ and ‘to suspect’ are 
no
> and yes
>. We do not consciously look for hints that would lead 
us to form a suspicion, as it was the case in ‘to investigate’, we detect that something 
happens, but we are passive perceivers of those hints that lead us to suspect. The 
property no
> is also selected, because when we suspect something, all we 
know is that something is going on but we cannot tell for sure whether what we suspect 
is true or not. In these meanings, the 2
nd
order property yes
> is 
also selected. As explained in Section 6.1.1, in the case of smell, the degree of reliability 
is less than in the other two senses, vision and hearing, where this property also applied. 
Consequently, the reliability of suspected events is less strong than the reliability of 
witnessed or heard events.