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

7.1.3. SUMMARY 
In this section, two main ideas are put forward; on the one hand, that polysemous 
senses are the result of the interaction of the meaning of the different parts of a sentence; 
and on the other, that although the same meanings are expressed in different languages, 
the way in which these different languages convey such meanings can be different. 
In the following section, I take up these ideas and apply them to the different 
semantic extensions of tactile and olfactory verbs. It will be argued that the 
compositionality of meaning is not the same in all cases, but hierarchically organised 
according to which element of the sentence – that is, the semantic content of which 
element – exercises a major influence in the overall meaning. Although the same 
semantic structures are possible in the three languages under investigation, the way in 
which these languages express such meanings is different.
7.2. TACTILE AND OLFACTORY POLYSEMY: AN ALTERNATIVE 
APPROACH. 
As was shown in Chapter 2, tactile and olfactory verbs can convey a wide range 
of physical and metaphorical extended meanings. These verbs are polysemous, but the 
issue here is to address the question of what causes this polysemy and how we can 
account for it. In Section 7.1, it is argued that previous cognitive analyses of polysemy in 
prepositions do not take into account the semantics of the other elements in the syntagm 
in which the preposition appears. It is shown that without these other elements it is not 
possible to infer such meanings.
As a possible solution to this problem, Pustejovsky’s compositional approach to 
polysemy was introduced in Chapter 4. The main thesis of Pustejovsky’s Generative 
Lexicon is that a core set of word senses is used to generate a larger set of word senses 
when individual lexical items are combined with others into phrases and clauses. After 
applying this model to some of the semantic extensions in tactile verbs, it was concluded 
that although Pustejovsky’s model seems to account for some of the main central 
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Goraka is formed by gora ‘upwards’ and the suffix –ka. This suffix denotes a repetitive action. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano
Chapter 2: The Semantic Field of Sense Perception 
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physical meanings of this semantic field, it fails to constrain how and why metaphorical 
expressions take place, because it allows the formation of infelicitous sentences (see 
Section 4.2.).
In sum, we need an approach that takes into account the role that the semantics of 
the different elements in a sentence plays in the overall meaning of that sentence, but at 
the same time constrains what elements can be put together in order to obtain such 
meaning. It is to this alternative approach that we turn now.