Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a cross-linguistic study
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‘He touched him with his hand’ (Aulestia 1989) (39) Zure hitzek sakon ukitu naute your words. ERG deeply touch AUX ‘Your words touched me very deeply’ One of the semantic extensions proposed by Sweetser (1990; see also Chapter 4) in the sense of smell is use of bad smell in English to refer to bad character or dislikeable characteristics (1990: 37). In a sentence like (40) below, the meaning can be taken as ambiguous, without any context it is not possible to tell whether we are referring to a physical ‘bad smell’ or a metaphorical ‘bad smell’. (40) What John is doing stinks In this sentence, what John is doing, is too vague without a context to be able to tell whether the meaning is metaphorical or not. If we change the subject for an entity like business in (41), then the ambiguity disappears because of the characteristics that an entity like business has, a business cannot actually give off a physical smell. Therefore, (41) must be understood metaphorically. (41) This business stinks According to the classification of graduable polysemy proposed in the previous section, (40) is an example of ‘unpredictable polysemy’ and (41) of ‘verb-driven extension’. However, in this section our major concern is not to classify this meaning according to the hierarchical graduable polysemy, but to see whether this classification for the English sentences corresponds to the same classification in its Basque and Spanish counterparts. In Basque, as pointed out in Chapter 2, there are no percept olfactory verbs. This meaning is expressed by the periphrasis usain erion ‘to give off smell’ as in (42) and (43). B. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Chapter 2: The Semantic Field of Sense Perception 204 (42) Jon egiten ari denari usain txarra dario john. ABS do. HAB be busy AUX . REL . DAT smell bad. ABS gives ‘What John is doing stinks’ (43) Negozio honi usain txarra dario business that. DAT smell bad. ABS gives ‘That business stinks’ As is the case in English, (42) can be interpreted both physically – what John is doing is producing a foul smell –, and metaphorically – what John is doing is not good, legal. In (43), on the other hand, the meaning is metaphorical due to the subject negozio honi ‘that business’. However, it is important to notice that the negative content in these two sentences – the fact that it is a bad smell –, is inferred by the adjective txar ‘bad’, not by the verb itself as it was the case in English. In Spanish, sentence (44) can be translated in two different ways. (44) Lo que está haciendo Juan huele mal it. ACC that is doing John smells badly ‘What John is doing stinks’ (45) Lo que está haciendo Juan me huele mal it. ACC that is doing John I. DAT smells badly ‘What John is doing stinks’ Sentence (44) corresponds to the physical meaning of stink. John is doing something and it is giving off this bad smell. We know that it has a bad smell because of the adverb mal ‘badly’; unlike in English, this negative quality of smell is not contained in the verb itself, but in the adverb or adverbial expression that is added to the verb 152 . 152 The Spanish verb apestar is the closest equivalent to English stink (see Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1997). Apestar can refer to both physical and metaphorical meanings. This verb is not used in this example, however, because it is not etymologically related to olfactory verbs, it comes from the word peste ‘plague’ (< Lat. pestis ‘destruction, plague’). Its semantic development, nevertheless, has followed a similar path. As noticed in Chapter 5, smells are usually named after the entity that gives off the smell, i.e. the plague. B. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Chapter 2: The Semantic Field of Sense Perception 205 Sentence (45), on the other hand, corresponds to the metaphorical meaning of stink. The only difference between these two sentences in Spanish is the use of the dative personal pronoun, me. Therefore, it seems that this pronoun triggers the shift from a physical domain to a metaphorical domain. The dative pronoun me suggests a major involvement of the speaker into the action he is reporting. Whereas in (44) the speaker simply says that what John is doing does not have a good smell, in (45) the speaker is not only reporting that, but also judging John's activity. In (44), the verb smell is understood as a percept verb – emission of smell. In (45), the verb smell changes from being a percept verb to an experiencer verb – perception of smell carried out unconsciously by the subject 153 . This change is carried out by the pronoun me. Interestingly enough, an unambiguous sentence like (41), where the subject this business seems to be crucial in the metaphorical interpretation, can be translated with or without the dative pronoun in Spanish as in (46). In both cases, the meaning remains metaphorical. (46) Este negocio (me) huele mal this business I. DAT smells badly ‘This business stinks’ These examples show that, although the same semantic mappings between different domains take place cross-linguistically, the strategies that each language follows to express such meanings are different. What in one language can be overtly expressed by a single lexical item – a verb –, in another language may require the meaning resulting from several lexical items – a verb and arguments. This statement has important implications for our theory of polysemy and its universal character. First of all, it is important to make a distinction between conceptual mappings on the one hand, and overt realisations of those conceptual mappings on the other, between After the verbalisation of this noun, the verb apestar has shifted from the physical meaning of giving off a bad smell to indicate that something has bad characteristics. 153 Recall the distribution of properties in the semantic extensions of smell in Section 6.2.3, (45) exemplifies the meaning ‘to suspect’, characterised by the properties >, >. B. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Chapter 2: The Semantic Field of Sense Perception 206 the links established between different domains of experience and the different strategies that languages follow to overtly express those links. In other words, one thing appeals to our conceptualisation of the world, shared by all humans with the same cultural background; the other, to the linguistic means that each language in particular has. In previous analyses of so called polysemous lexical items, there was no distinction between these two concepts. If a lexical item was to be taken as polysemous in itself, that is to say if polysemous senses were localised in one lexical item without taking into account the semantic content of the other words that co-occur with this lexical item, then both conceptual structure and overt expression of such conceptual structure were the same. If the conceptual structure were cross-linguistic, and conceptual structure and the overt expression of such conceptual structure were the same, then, transitively, it could be argued that both were cross-linguistic. However, I have shown that this is not the case. Lexical items are not generally polysemous in themselves, unless they are cases of ‘unpredictable polysemy’. They need the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those polysemous senses, and as shown in this section, which lexical items are required to trigger and build the different extended polysemous readings are not the same in every language 154 . It is for these reasons that I will consider that the verbs themselves are not polysemous, but that the conceptual domain of sense perception is polysemous. The different mappings presented in Chapter 2 are not to be taken as semantic extensions of the perception verbs themselves, but polysemous senses of the conceptual domain of sense perception. I will call the group of these extended meanings ‘conceptual Download 1.39 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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