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

w
- 
-Basic IE vision roots: *spek’- >
inspect, *weid- > witness 
-Physical sight Æ Knowledge, 
intellection 
-Physical vision Æ meant ‘vision’ 
-Cases with only mental meaning 
HEARING 
-Physical domain: *aus- ‘ear’ 
-IE roots: *kleus ‘listen’
-Onomatopoeic origin 
crash 
-Verbs of hearing: Cl Gk kluo, Eng 
listen, Dan lystre ‘obey’. 
-Not sound but content of heard speech 
-Physical sound 
-‘listen, heed’ 
SMELL 
-It frequently comes under general sense 
perception. 
E.g. Fr sentir ‘feel’, ‘smell’ < Lat sentire 
-If different from general tactile 
sensation, they often derive from specific 
physical sensations: a sweet smell; or 
from aspects of the physical act of 
perception: Eng reek, G rauchen ‘smoke’ 
-Few abstract or mental connotations. 
E.g. Bad smell is used in English to 
indicate bad character or dislikeable 
mental characteristics. 
E.g. This stinks; stinker 
TASTE 
-IE root: *g’eus (Lat gustare). It could 
have meant ‘try’ (Gothic kiusan) or 
‘choose’ (OE ceosan), rather than ‘taste’. 
-It seems universally to be linked to 
personal likes and dislikes in the mental 
world. 
TOUCH 
-General sense of perception 
-Physical feeling: Lat sentire, GK pascho 
-Emotional feeling. 
E.g. deeply touched 
Table 4.1: Sweetser’s routes for English sense-verbs. 
In the case of vision, Sweetser identifies a basic metaphorical understanding of 
this sense that leads to the connection of vision to intellectual activity. Some vision 
terms involve physical perceptions or manipulations and have correlates in the domain 
of intellectual operations. As important as the routes for sense perception are the patterns 
that unify these semantic changes. In this case, Sweetser suggests three reasons for this 
parallelism between vision and intellection: (i) Vision is our primary source of objective 
data about the world. It gives us more information than any of the other senses, and it 
appears that children rely most heavily on visual features in their early categorisation. 
(ii) The focusing ability of vision that enables us to pick up one stimulus at will from 
many, to differentiate fine features. (iii) Vision is identical for different people who can 
take the same viewpoint. Therefore, it seems to provide a basis for shared public 
knowledge. 
110

---

B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
111
Indo-European hearing words usually come from the anatomical domain, from 
the physical organ of hearing, i.e. *aus- ‘ear’. A common characteristic for nominals 
from IE verbs of hearing is the fact that they do not denote sound (the physical thing 
heard), but the content of heard speech. The physical sound has often an onomatopoeic 
origin (Buck 1949), as for example, Eng bang or pop, Bq tirots, zart, punpa ‘bang’, 
blaustrada, zanpa ‘crash’ or Sp pum ‘bang, pop’, patapum ‘crash’. In hearing, it is very 
interesting to note how the proposed unidirectionality of meaning change from concrete 
to abstract is not totally universal. Words meaning mental attention or understanding can 
come to mean physical hearing. While in most Romance languages, the words derived 
from Lat intendere ‘stretch out, direct one’s attention to’ come to mean ‘understand’ (cf. 
Sp entender, It intendere), in French, the semantic development went on and in Modern 
French, entendre means primarily ‘hear’. 
In Sweetser’s opinion, the sense of hearing is similar to the sense of vision, the 
most salient sense. Hearing shares with vision some of its characteristics when speaking 
about mental activity, but it is not the same kind of activity. In hearing, the voluntarily 
on-off control of vision is no longer applicable, we cannot control the reception of 
sounds
101
. 
The function of hearing is regarded as linguistic communication, as a means of 
intellectual and emotional influence on each other; this is carried out in an effective 
manner via the vocal organs and the auditory sense-channel. The sense of hearing, 
therefore is connected to: (i) Heedfulness and internal receptivity, (ii) Internal reception 
of ideas, understanding what is heard. 
This readiness to internally receive and understand implies a readiness to subject 
oneself to the influence of the speaker’s content, and perhaps this readiness to further 
respond in the way desired is what has caused the verb to also mean ‘obey’. As Sweetser 
states “internal receptiveness to the speaker’s intentions which might subsequently lead 
to compliance with the speaker’s requests” (1990:41). But if the sense connected par 
excellence with the sphere of understanding and knowledge is vision, the question is 
101
It is true that we cannot close our hearing perception, our ears, in the same way as we can 
close our eyes, if we do not want to see something. However, it is equally true that we can decide when to 
pay attention to something we are hearing and when not. In this case, I think we do have some kind of on-