Abstract

We often use verbs that describe sight, sound, touch, taste and smell to explain the nature of the world and the manner we perceive it. What is profoundly intriguing, though, is how frequently these words refer to things outside of our physical reality. They also allude to "knowledge," “thinking,” "feelings," and "preferences," rather than just "shapes and colours," "sounds," "textures," "flavours," or "odours." Our physiological experiences have a significant impact on how we think and communicate. Such expressions are manifestations of conceptual metaphors, which are fundamental cognitive mappings between the source and target domains. Thus, the current cross-linguistic study focusses on the metaphorical use of visual (‘see’ and gani) and auditory (‘hear’ and ji) verbs in English and Hausa romance novels. The conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson and the mind-as-body metaphor theory of Sweetser serve as the theoretical foundations for this study. The study is situated within the cognitive semantics domain and adopts a qualitative corpus-based approach to collect its data. Ibarretxe-Antuñano’s (2013a) perception metaphor model was used for data analysis. Although the findings revealed that the two languages share some perception metaphors, they differ significantly in a number of perception metaphors. Specifically, the findings from English data consistently show that knowledge and understanding are developed from the verbs of vision, which provide support for the universality of perception metaphor. However, findings from the Hausa data provide evidence otherwise, in that the higher intellection verbs such as ‘understanding’ are developed from auditory perception verbs, thus suggesting culture-specificity of the perception metaphors.