Metaphorical extensions of the lexicon of the lower senses in Beja: A typological, cultural and cognitive perspective

International audience Until recently, the lexicon of olfaction, gustatory and tactile perceptions was less studied than vision and auditory perceptions (for recent development, mostly in the olfaction domain, see Blench & Longtau 1995; Boisson 1997; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999; Storch 2004; Majid et al. 2007; Burenhult & Majid 2011; Dingemanse & Majid 2012; Levinson & Majid 2014; Lee 2015; Wnuk et al. 2017; Jędrzejowski et al. in press). Although Beja (North-Cushitic, Afroasiatic) does not have a particularly elaborated lexicon in these semantic domains, it nevertheless presents interesting metaphorical extensions that, among other things, challenge both the semantic hierarchy proposed by Ullmann (1957) for transfers from one perception domain to another (based on a corpus of 19th century poetry): touch > hear > taste > scent > sound > sight, and the possible cross-linguistic metaphors as thought of by Sweetser (1999).Based on a previous research by Vanhove and Hamid Amhed (in press) on naturalistic and elicited data, this presentation will first discuss the organization of the three senses vocabulary from a functional and semantic perspective and its relations to what it known so far from other languages of the world. It will then focus on the metaphorical extensions of the lexicon of olfaction, gustatory and tactile perceptions from the point of view of their cultural and cognitive underpinning, and discuss them in a typological perspective embedded in the above mentioned references as well as Sweetser’s (1999) study and a few others.