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

CHAPTER 5: PERCEPTION, THE SENSES AND 
OUR LANGUAGE. 
One of the main tenets of Cognitive Linguistics is the idea of embodiment, i.e. 
how meaning is grounded in the nature of our bodies and perception, in our interaction 
with the physical, social, and cultural environment that surrounds us. Concepts are 
grounded in our bodily experience and then elaborated by structures of imagination, i.e. 
metaphor. This implies that if we are able to characterise the domain of experience that 
constitutes the source domain it will be possible to explain the semantic extensions that 
occur in the corresponding target domain. In other words, the reason why it is possible to 
use these verbs of perception to express other meanings – apart from the physical sense 
perception – must lie in the way we perceive and experience the senses.
In this chapter, I will establish what the bodily basis of perception verbs is. 
Section 5.1 describes how human perception works. In Section 5.2 the relation of the 
main properties that describe the process of perception through the five senses is 
presented. Section 5.3 states the differences between these properties and semantic 
features in Componential Analysis. Finally, some conclusions are drawn in Section 5.4. 
5.1. Perception and the senses 
According to Sekuler and Blake (1994), perception is a biological process 
wherein the brain derives descriptions of objects and events in the world, using 
information gathered by the senses. Thus, the traditional five
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senses – vision, hearing, 
touch, smell and taste – have been described as “channels for information about the 
world” (Sekuler and Blake 1994), and as “different modalities for conveying 
information about the physical world” (Classen 1993: 4). There are two key words in 
these definitions: information and different. The five senses give us information about 
the world we live in, but the way this information is perceived, processed, and 
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There has not always been agreement on the number of senses. Based on the intrinsic 
relationship between the senses and the elements – earth, air, fire, water, and the quintessence – Aristotle, 
in De Anima (c. 320 BC), was the first one to group them into five. This classification, however, has been 

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B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano 
Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs 
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understood by human beings is different. These differences are based on biological and 
cultural constraints. Biologically, each sense has its own receptors – eyes, ears, skin, 
nose, mouth – and its own pathways to the brain. Each sense receptor responds to 
different stimuli: light, sound waves, mechanical disturbances, volatile substances, and 
soluble substances. Culturally, human beings rely more on some senses than on others. 
For Western societies, vision is the most reliable sense. This supremacy of sight over the 
other senses finds its origin at the Enlightenment, when philosophers such as Locke and 
Descartes regarded sight as the sense of science. However, in earlier periods of Western 
history, as well as in other contemporary cultures, senses such as smell, touch, and 
hearing are considered important in making sense of the world
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. For instance, Classen 
et al. (1994: ch. 3) report on the Ongee of the Andaman Islands in the South Pacific, 
whose lives are ordered by smell. For the Tzotzil of Mexico, reported in Classen (1993: 
ch. 6) heat (hence touch) constitutes the basic force of the cosmos. Yet for Australian 
aborigines hearing is more salient than any other sense (Evans and Wilkins 1998). 
There are three main elements in perception: the person that carries out the 
perception or perceiver (PR), the object – animate or inanimate – being perceived (OP) 
and the act of perception itself (P). It is to a description of these elements that we turn 
now.