Predictable vs. Unpredictable Polysemy

1. SEMANTIC FIELD OF TACTUAL VERBS 1. The sense of touch has always been related to the field of emotions. Expressions such as I'm deeply touched or touching words are widely used in English. Hans Kurath (1921) had already classified sense perception in respect to emotions and stated how 'the kinaesthetic, the visceral, and the tactual perceptions have a relatively stronger tone than those of hearing and especially of sight, the taste-smell perceptions taking a middle ground' (p.39). Kurath explained this transfer of meaning from sense perception to emotion on the basis of the similarity of feeling that both domains share. This connection finds an explanation in etymology as well. Buck (1949:1062) points out that the general word for 'feel of' and for 'feel' as 'perceive by touch' in West Germanic languages refers not only to the physical perception but also to the emotions, even in the earliest periods of the language. In the 90's, Eve Sweetser (1990) proposed the same mappings between these two domains within the framework of cognitive linguistics. is that linguistic structure is based on human cognition, i.e. on human perception and understanding of the world. Reality cannot be accessed independently from human categorisation, and consequently the structure of reality as it is reflected in language is a product of the human mind. Sweetser applies these cognitive ideas to the study of semantic change and claims that the paths of semantic change are unidirectional: from the external (sociophysical) domain to our internal (emotional, psychological) domain; that is to say from a concrete source domain to an abstract target domain. These mappings between different conceptual domains, which appear to be a cross-linguistic rather than a language-specific phenomenon, are carried out by means of metaphors. Metaphors are understood as transfers, where properties from one concept are transferred to another, and in this way, it is how they 'allow us to understand one domain of experience (target) in terms of another (source)' (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:135). In the case of perception verbs, it seems that these metaphorical mappings take place between two domains: the vocabulary of physical perception (concrete source domain) and the vocabulary of internal self and sensations (abstract target domain). And for the particular case of tactual verbs, between physical touching and emotion. However, if we review the different meanings that tactual verbs can convey in English, it is found that these verbs map not only onto …