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

2.2. PHYSICAL MEANINGS IN PERCEPTION VErBS 
2.2.1. SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATIONS Of perception verbs 
The semantic field of perception has five components: vision, hearing, touch, 
smell and taste. Although the label ‘perception’ refers to verbs such as see, look, hear, 
listen, sound, smell, touch, feel and taste among others, as an overall group it is very 
important for our analysis to bear in mind that these verbs can be classified in three 
different groups according to the semantic role of their subjects. 
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‘Egungo Euskararen Bilketa-lan Sistematikoa’. 
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‘Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual’. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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The first group of verbs is traditionally described as “the receiving of an 
expression by the senses independently of the will of the person concerned” (Poutsma 
1926: 341). As for instance example (1) shows: 
(1)
a. 
Peter saw the birds
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. 
b. Peter 
heard the birds. 
c. Peter 
felt a stone under his foot. 
d. 
Peter 
smelled cigars in the room. 
e. 
Peter 
tasted garlic in the food. 
In (1), the subject does not consciously control the stimuli; it refers to a state or 
inchoative achievement. The process described in each of the verbs used in this set of 
examples, namely see, hear, smell, feel, taste, is that of the perception of various 
phenomena via the relevant sense organ: eye, ear, skin, nose and mouth (taste buds) 
respectively. 
This set of verbs is called ‘passive perception’ (Palmer 1966: 99), ‘inner 
perception’ (Leech 1971: 23), ‘cognition’
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(Rogers 1971: 206, 1972: 304), ‘stative with 
experiencer subject’ (Lehrer 1990: 223), and ‘experience’ (Viberg 1984: 123). 
The second group of verbs is those exemplified in (2): 
(2)
a. 
Peter looked at the birds. 
b. 
Peter 
listened to the birds. 
c. 
Peter 
felt the cloth (/to see how soft it was/ 
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). 
d. 
Peter 
smelled the cigar (/to see if he could smoke it/). 
e. 
Peter 
tasted the food (/to see if he could eat it/). 
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The examples in (1), and those in (2) and (4) below, are all taken from Viberg (1984). 
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In his thesis, Rogers (1973) divides this type of verbs into two classes: stative and inchoative. 
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/ / is the test frame. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
44
These verbs are called ‘active perception verbs’ (Poutsma 1926: 341; Leech 
1971: 23; Rogers 1971: 206, 1972: 304), ‘active experiencer subject’ (Lehrer 1990: 
223), and ‘active’ (Viberg 1984: 123). They refer to an “unbounded process that is 
consciously controlled by a human agent” (Viberg 1984: 123). 
In order to distinguish between these two groups Gisborne (1996: 1) proposes the 
‘deliberately test’. He assumes that those verbs that can occur with the adverb are to be 
classified as ‘agentive’ (active) verbs, whereas those verbs that do not readily occur with 
this adverb are examples of involuntary perception. 
For instance (from Gisborne 1996: 1), 
(3)
a.
Jane was deliberately listening to the music. 
b. 
*Jane 
deliberately heard the music. 
As the verb listen in (3a) accepts the adverb deliberately, it can be classified as 
an agentive verb; while in (3b) the infelicity of this adverb with hear indicates that it is 
an experience verb. 
The last group is formed by those verbs whose subjects are the stimuli of the 
perception as illustrated in (4). 
(4)
a.
Peter looked happy. 
b. 
Peter 
sounded happy. 
c. 
The 
cloth 
felt soft. 
d. 
Peter 
smelled good / of cigars. 
e. 
The 
food 
tasted good / of garlic. 
This group is called ‘flip verbs’ (Rogers 1971: 206, 1972: 304), ‘stimulus 
subject’ (Lehrer 1990: 223), ‘copulative’ (Viberg 1984: 123), and ‘percept’ (Gisborne 
1996:1). 
Viberg (1984) establishes the differences between experience and activity verbs 
on the one hand and copulative verbs on the other, on the basis of what he calls ‘base 
selection’, i.e. the choice of grammatical subject among the deep semantic case roles 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
45
associated with a certain verb. In the former case, verbs are ‘experiencer-based’; that is 
to say the verb takes an animate being with certain mental experience as a subject. In the 
latter case, verbs are ‘source-based’ or ‘phenomenon-based’, as the verb takes the 
experienced entity as a subject. 
As seen from the description of each group above, these different types of 
perception verbs receive different terms according to different authors
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. In this study, I 
follow Viberg’s terminology for the experiencer-based verbs (i.e. active and experience) 
and Gisborne’s for the source-based ones (i.e. percept). Therefore the basic
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paradigm 
of the verbs of perception in English is shown in Table 2.1. 
S
ENSE MODALITY
E
XPERIENCE
A
CTIVITY
P
ERCEPT
V
ISION
See Look 
Look 
H
EARING
Hear Listen Sound 
T
OUCH
Feel / Touch 
Touch / Feel 
Feel 
S
MELL
Smell Smell 
/ 
Sniff 
Smell 
T
ASTE
Taste Taste Taste 
Table 2.1: The basic paradigm of verbs of perception in English. 
It is important to notice in the verbs presented in Table 2.1 that in cases such as 
hearing there is a different verb belonging to this sense perception for each group. In the 
other cases however, there are not different lexical items for each group. This does not 
imply that the distinction between experience, activity, and percept is less important in 
these cases (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 618), but that, as Lehrer (1990: 223) points 
out, only one polysemous verb corresponds to the three of them.
These three groups represent the three possible prototypical meanings that 
perception verbs can convey. As introduced in Chapter 1, ‘prototype’ is the typical 
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See Rogers (1973) and Kryk (1979) for a critical survey of such classifications. 
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The verbs presented in this table are by no means the only verbs that can be included in the 
semantic field of perception; other verbs such as watch, gaze, observe, notice, hearken, stink, stench, 
savour, smack, among others could have been included. However, I have selected only the most common, 
neutral, and prototypical perception verbs for English, as well as for Basque and Spanish in the following 
section, because they are free from any specific connotations about the way in which the perceptual act is 
being carried out. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
46
member of a category to which other members are related in a motivated way. It is in 
this sense that I call these physical meanings prototypical
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.