Typological Hierarchy and Cognitive Motivation: English and Hausa Perception Verbs in Romance Fiction

Abstract

Viberg’s (1983) hierarchy describes recurrent cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of perception, but it does not by itself predict which sensory verbs develop cognitive meanings. This study examines non-literal extensions of English see and hear and Hausa gani ‘see’ and ji ‘hear/feel/taste/smell’. The data come from a specialised corpus of four English and twelve Hausa romance novels. Concordance lines were screened with the Pragglejaz Metaphor Identification Procedure and classified by semantic extension. In the reported data, understanding is associated mainly with English see (127/260 non-literal tokens, 48.8%) and Hausa ji (33/102, 32.4%). It is not associated with English hear or Hausa gani. The comparison therefore supports a qualified account. Typological hierarchy remains useful for lexical organisation and the range of extensions, whereas the selection of a sensory source for cognition also requires attention to lexical polysemy, embodied properties, discourse practice and cultural context. Because the corpora are genre-specific and contain unequal numbers of texts, the findings are interpreted as patterns in the sampled fiction. They are not presented as population-level properties of English and Hausa. The article reframes earlier results from this research programme as a focused test of the relationship between typological description and cognitive motivation.