Feeling your neighbour: an experimental approach to the polysemy oftundma‘to feel’ in Estonian

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper offers an experimental approach to the polysemy of the Estonian perception verbtundma‘to feel’ from the perspective of theperception➔cognitionmetaphor. First, a sorting task is used to map how native speakers perceive the different senses oftundma‘to feel’. The results show that cognition-related senses oftundmaform the most distinct and coherent group. This set was researched further by means of a second experiment, a conceptual feature rating task. The aim of this task was to assess if the cognition-related meanings oftundmadiffer from other cognition verbs of Estonian (teadma‘to know’,aru saama‘to understand’) in that they are metaphorically linked to physical perception. It was predicted that native speakers use characteristics tied to the physical perception in the conceptualisation of the type of knowledge expressed bytundma. However, native speakers did not rate sentences withtundmaas more physical than sentences with abstract cognition verbs. This result is indicative of the nature of the semantics oftundmabeing more varied than was first thought. It is argued that the semantics oftundmarefer to it being a verb of general proximal perception.