Polysemy of Adjectives in the Domain of TASTE and TOUCH in English and Bosnian

The aim of the paper is to analyze polysemy of Adjectives used in the domains of TASTE and TOUCH in English and Bosnian. Like most linguistic expressions belonging to primary sense perceptions, these Adjectives are highly polysemous. Although these Adjectives are figuratively used in many domains (emotion, cognition, communication etc.), this study will include only those variations of meaning which belong to the domains of TASTE and TOUCH. This means that their metaphorical uses for emotions, cognition and other domains, such as a cold look, a warm welcome, a sweet girl or a bitter argument will not be included. The focus will be on meanings which illustrate the interplay between TASTE and TOUCH such as soft drinks, hot pepper, bitter cold or sharp taste. The theoretical framework for this contrastive corpus analysis will be the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. In the first part of the paper, we will make the inventory of Adjectives whose primary meaning belongs to the domains of TASTE and TOUCH and make a comparison between the two languages. The second part of the paper will first present their meaning extensions within the same domain, for example the extension of sweet from sweet chocolate to sweet onion, sweet pepper and sweet Italian saussage. Then we will analyse how the Adjectives whose primary meaning is TASTE are used in the domain of TOUCH (for example bitter cold) and vice versa (for example sharp taste). These results of this analysis will be compared for English in Bosnian. In the third part of the paper, we will try to find the motivation for different related meanings of these Adjectives in cognitive processes, primarily in conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Finally, we will compare how these cognitive processes operate in English and Bosnian.