A Study of Polysemy and Metaphor of Hausa Perception Verbsof Vision: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach

Abstract

This paper examines the polysemy and metaphor of Hausa perception verbs of vision from a cognitive semantics perspective, which is a sub-field of cognitive linguistics. The objective of the study is to identify how underlying polysemous extensions of the Hausa perception verbs trigger the conceptual metaphor of vision. In conducting the research, ethnographic research methods were employed in collecting the data for this study, while the conceptual polysemy model proposed by Ibarretxe-Antunano (1999) and the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) propounded by Lakoff and Jhonson (1980) were adopted as the theoretical framework of the research. The outcome of the study reveals that Hausa perception verbs of vision, when polysemously extended conceptually, encode an array of conceptual metaphors that conceptually denote mental activity and experience, social activity, and evidential experience. Finally, the result of the study establishes a relationship between perception and cognition.