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

1.1.3. SUMMARY
In this section, I have summarised the main theoretical and methodological tenets 
in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. This thesis is built on these assumptions. It 
has been shown how this model takes human experience as the motivation for what is 
meaningful in the human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the 
application of cognitive processes to conceptual structures. Meaning structures come not 
only from the direct relationship with the external world but also from the nature of 
bodily and social experience (how humans experience with the world) and from human 
capacity to project from some aspects based on this experience to some abstract 
conceptual structures. This is perhaps one of the achievements of this approach: the fact 
that imaginative aspects of reason, such as metaphor, metonymy and mental imagery are 
seen as central to reason, not as extra-linguistic aspects. This allows for the existence of 
those meanings that do not have real-world reference. As we shall see in Chapter 4, 
within the Cognitive Linguistics framework, Eve Sweetser (1990) demonstrates that 
some polysemous structures in Indo-European can be explained only by metaphorical 
projections, motivated by common human experiences, within the human conceptual 
system. 
In the following section, I review the state of theart in polysemy. Three main 
trends in polysemy are analysed in this section: Traditional Semantics (Section 1.2.1), 
Cognitive Semantics (section 1.2.2), and Lexical Semantics (Section 1.2.3). 
1.2. The state of the art in POLYSEMY 
Polysemy has been traditionally defined as the case when “a lexical item
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… has 
a range of different meanings” (Crystal 1991: 267). This definition could seem to be 
very simple and straightforward at first, but since Bréal (1900) addressed the problem 
that this term may involve, many linguists have tried to find a solution for it, without 
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There has been some discussion on the terminology used for the definition of what a word is in 
dictionaries. Leech (1981: 229) proposes two definitions for ‘lexical item’: 
(i) a bundle of lexical entries sharing the same morphological specification p
1
. 
(ii) a bundle of lexical entries sharing the same morphological specification p
1
and the same 
syntactic specification q
1
Leech argues that it would be better to name each definition with a different term, namely ‘lexical 
item’ and ‘lexeme’ respectively. In this thesis, no distinctions are made between these two terms, although 
the words dealt with in the analysis fall within the scope of definition (ii). 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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giving a sound answer for it
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. Polysemy is always presented in opposition to 
homonymy. The basic criteria for differentiating the two cases is to say that polysemy 
happens when one form has several meanings and homonymy, when two lexical items 
happen to have the same phonological form
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. 
These definitions could make the problem look simple and place both cases at 
opposite ends; especially if we look at typical examples of polysemy, like the verb run, 
or at examples of homonymy such as bank (‘river bank’, ‘money bank’). However, these 
definitions do not work for most of the cases where there is an ambiguity in meaning, 
mainly because of the great number of borderline cases in which the differences between 
one term and another are not so clear-cut (Lehrer 1974). 
In this Section, some of the main approaches dealing with these phenomena are 
reviewed. These approaches are Traditional Linguistics (Lyons 1977; Palmer 1981; 
Cruse 1986), Cognitive Linguistics (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1995), and 
Lexical Semantics and the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995).