“Harsh realities” and “tender gazes”: Do perceptual extensions function metaphorically or literally? : A corpus-based investigation of haptic adjectives and the “extent of the literal”

Abstract: This thesis investigates how perceptual adjectives are used to convey non-perceptual experience. The study is corpus-based, and the material consists of adjective-noun pairs in which the premodifying adjective is derived from the haptic modality. The thesis builds on previous research by Winter (2019a) and argues that the multimodal nature of perceptual adjectives complicates metaphorical interpretations. Moreover, following Rakova (2003), it is argued that many perceptual adjectives are double-function and contain a psychological meaning that is equally literal to the physical, negating the need for metaphorical interpretations; this psychological meaning is reflected through the oftentimes evaluative function of perceptual adjectives. Although the results of the investigation do not allow any broad conclusions to be drawn due to the limited nature of the data, evidence is found that the standard assumption of primary meaning, and ideas of conceptual primacy can be questioned for several of the investigated adjectives. Furthermore, it is argued that tools used in the identification of lexical metaphor created from perceptual adjectives are perhaps not optimal and reinforce a belief that only physical meaning can be literal – a notion that the results of this thesis go some way to dispelling.