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

CHAPTER 4: PROBLEMS IN POLYSEMY 
In the preceding chapters, I have offered a typology of the different meanings 
that perception verbs convey in present-day English, Basque and Spanish. I have also 
provided an etymological description of these verbs to support the cross-linguistic 
character of such extended meanings. It is on the basis of these data that I will construct 
the theoretical hypotheses in this thesis. These hypotheses will explain why and how 
these polysemous senses happen. 
In this chapter, I review two different approaches to meaning extension. 
Sweetser’s (1990) semantic account of perception verbs, and Pustejovsky’s (1995) 
Generative Lexicon. I set out the advantages of these approaches that will be useful for 
my own analysis, as well as the gaps in these models that need to be addressed.
Sweetser (1990) investigates the multiple meanings in the semantic field of 
English perception verbs. She shows that lexical polysemy cannot be understood 
independently of human cognitive structure. The fact that everyday cognition is 
metaphorically shaped, at least partially, helps us to understand the way in which the 
senses of polysemous words are related. Sweetser’s approach to semantic extension is 
presented and discussed in Section 4.1.
Although I agree that metaphor is the primary cognitive mechanism by which the 
structure of human experience is created and extended, metaphor cannot entirely explain 
why some semantic changes do not shift towards a more abstract meaning, but remain 
physical. Metaphor also has difficulty in explaining the shifts of meaning which are 
caused by the different arguments in the sentence. In order to solve this problem, 
Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon is analysed in Section 4.2, followed by a discussion 
of this framework when applied to our data. 
Finally, I draw some conclusions in Section 4.3.