Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a cross-linguistic study
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PhD-Thesis-99
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6.3. CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has explored the question of how linguistic expressions related to the sense modalities are created and constrained by the way human beings perceive and understand the five senses. 175 B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs Based on two of the properties for the five sense modalities defined in Chapter 5, namely properties constrain some of the possible semantic extensions in perception verbs. Section 6.2 has focused on tactile and olfactory semantic extensions. This section has concentrated on metaphorical constraints. It has revised the ‘Invariance Principle’ (Lakoff 1993) and discussed the shortcomings of such a principle. As a solution, the processes called ‘Property Selection’ have been introduced. These processes are defined as “the selection of some of the properties from the set of prototypical properties that characterise the source domain in the target domain”. These processes show exactly what part of the source domain is used, not only in metaphorical meaning extensions, but also in physical extended meanings. They can be considered as a formalisation of what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) called the ‘used’ part of metaphor. Figure 6.5 represents how these processes are applied to physical extended meanings. Figure 6.6 shows how these processes are applied to metaphorical extended meanings. Prototypical physical meanings Property selected physical meaning Property Selection Process Figure 6.5: Property Selection Processes in extended physical meanings. In the case of extended physical meanings, there is only one step taken. Through Property Selection Processes (PSPs), there is a selection of some properties from the source domain into the target domain, giving as a result the property selected physical meaning. In the case of metaphorical extensions, there are two steps taken. On the one hand, as in physical extended extensions, PSPs carry out the selection of some of the prototypical properties from one domain onto the other. On the other hand, metaphorical 176 B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs processes are also applied in order to convert the physical meaning to an abstract meaning, with the final result of a property selected, metaphorical abstract meaning. Prototypical physical meanings Property selected, metaphorical abstract meaning Property Selection Metaphor Figure 6.6: Property selection and metaphorical processes in metaphorical extended meanings. These processes have been applied to the semantic fields of tactile and olfactory verbs. The properties selected in the extended meanings of these two senses are summarised in Table 6.2. TOUCH ‘to partake of food’ >, >, > ‘to affect’ >, >, > ‘to deal with’ >, > ‘to reach’ >, >, > SMELL ‘to trail something’ >, > ‘to investigate’ >, > ‘to guess’ >, >, >, > ‘to suspect’ >, >, >, > Table 6.2: Selected properties in touch and smell. In this Chapter, two of the main research questions in this thesis have been discussed: how to account for extended physical meanings and how to constrain 177 B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 178 metaphor. Chapter 7 takes up the issue of polysemy and discusses it in relation with the extended meanings of tactile and olfactory verbs as well. It will be argued that the polysemous senses in these verbs are obtained by the interaction of these verbs with the different elements they co-occur with. The role that these elements and these verbs play in the overall meaning of the sentence is not the same, but varies in every semantic extension. This will be called ‘Graduable Polysemy’. It will also be argued that although semantic extensions are cross-linguistic, the way in which they are obtained is language specific. B. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Chapter 2: The Semantic Field of Sense Perception 179 Download 1.39 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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