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

2.2.3. summary 
In this section the main prototypical physical meanings of the verbs in the 
semantic field of perception in Basque, English and Spanish have been established. 
Following Viberg’s (1984) and Gisborne’s (1996) classification of perception verbs on 
the basis of the semantic role of their subjects, perception verbs are divided into three 
groups: experience, activity and percept. In the following section the non-prototypical 
meanings of these verbs in these three languages are presented. 
2.3. NON-PROTOTYPICAL MEANINGS IN PERCEPTION VERBS 
In this section I analyse the non-prototypical meanings in perception verbs in 
Basque, English and Spanish. Non-prototypical meanings are all those extended 
meanings, both physical and metaphorical, that these verbs can convey apart from the 
central prototypical meaning of physical perception as explained in Section 2.2. In this 
analysis, I focus on activity and experience verbs only. I do not include percept verbs 
because, unlike English, they are relatively poor in Spanish and almost non-existant in 
Basque. Whereas activity and experience verbs have verbal lexical items for almost 
every sense in the three languages, (see in Section 2.2.2), percept verbs are mostly 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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lexicalised either by a perception noun followed by a verb, or by a non-perception verb. 
In order to avoid any possible imbalance that this lack of percept verbs may have caused 
in the results of the analysis, I leave them outside this study.
It is important to point out that in the following sections I do not consider some 
of the more complex uses of perception verbs with different types of complementation
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. 
In other words, I do not study the functional dependency between different syntactic 
types of complements and the entities that they encode in each case. Entities refer to the 
different levels of abstraction involved when we categorise the structure of the world. 
These different levels have been given a variety of names in the literature. Vendler 
(1967, 1970) distinguishes between ‘objects’, ‘events’, and ‘propositions’. Lyons (1977) 
between ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third order’ entities. Horie (1993) between ‘objects’, 
‘directly perceived events’, and ‘indirectly perceived events’. Dik and Hengeveld (1991) 
between the ‘immediate perception of an individual’, the ‘immediate perception of a 
state-of-affairs’, the ‘mental perception of propositional content’, and the ‘reception of 
the propositional content of a speech act’.
Studies
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have shown that there is a correlation between the type of syntactic 
complement the perception verb takes and the entity encoded in each case. That is to 
say, it seems that there is a relationship between the systematic meaning extensions of 
perception verbs in the cognitive domain with the type of complement they take. 
Observe the following examples: 
(12) 
John saw the car 
(13) 
John saw Mary crossing the street 
(14) 
John saw that Mary crossed the street 
In (12) the complement is the noun phrase the car which corresponds to what 
Lyons’ calls ‘first order entity’, a physical object. In (12) we understand that John 
physically perceived a car with his eyes. In (13) the complement is a non-finite sentence, 
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See Noonan (1985) for more information about complementation. I would like to thank Keith 
Mitchell for showing me how interesting perception verb complements can be. 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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the gerund crossing the street. The meaning is still perceptual: John physically perceived 
with his eyes an event, i.e. Mary crossing the street. This complement corresponds to the 
‘second order entities’. The complement in (14) is a finite clause. In this case the 
meaning of the sentence is not perceptual; John did not see Mary walking from one side 
of the street to the other. What John saw is that Mary was already on the other side and 
he deduced that she had crossed the street. In other words, the verb to see does not 
encode the acquisition of sense data through the eyes, but the mental manipulation of an 
information gathered by the eyes. Therefore, there is a semantic extension from 
perception to cognition. 
The systematic relationship between the semantics and the syntax of perception 
verb complements has been discussed in a number of studies in respect to several 
languages (see references above). This area, however, falls beyond the scope of the 
present thesis, which is focused on a semantic description of perception verbs. 
For each sense, first of all I discuss those extended meanings that are cross-
linguistic, and then I mention other extended meanings particular to each language under 
investigation.