‘A pig will recognize the body [of the person who is its owner]’. (Dun_150/LSR)
Moving on from uses that were related to cognition, English included one example that exemplified the link between touch and emotion (You’re making me feel guilty Eng_030/KK), as discussed by Sweetser (1990). In Spanish, tocó ‘touch’ was used on one occasion to express obligation. Two examples from Duna conceptualized ‘touching’ as exerting control, and as involving or talking negatively about a person. These latter three extended meanings of touch (‘oblige’, ‘have control over’, ‘involve’) relate broadly to affectedness as a common extension of tactility (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006).
In sum — despite the paucity of tokens — touch, taste and smell showed cognition-related meanings, specifically, knowledge and experience (touch), finding out (taste), and recognition (smell), while touch verbs in the database also gave evidence for the relevance of tactile expressions to emotion and to the interpersonally charged domains of deontic modality (obligation) and affectedness.
3.4 Multi-sense terms Multi-sense verbs (Table 4) are those that can be used to express a range of sensory meanings (excluding temperature and proprioceptive meanings, which are not considered here). For the purposes of our study we interpret the verbs in Table 4 as having lexicalized multi-sensory potential, as distinct from more ad-hococcurrences of intrafield polysemy (see Section 3.5). (Additional examples showing multi-sense verbs are available in the Supplementary Materials: S26–S37).
Table 4: Multi-sense terms in the data sample (adapted from San Roque et al. 2015; a dashed line delineates default meanings, where relevant).
