For a long time, semantic change was considered an irregular, whimsical and random phenomenon. The creation of general rules that could explain how and why these changes took place was thought to be impossible (Hock 1986:308).
Fortunately, in recent years, researches have proven this belief to be wrong: word meaning is not chaotic, but a unified entity with its own structure.
Among different approaches, Sweetser (1990) proposed that semantic change is unidirectional, from a concrete source domain to an abstract target domain, and that these domains were linked by means of metaphor.
In this paper, it will be argued that metaphors are not the only processes present in the interrelations among domains, but that before them, metonymical processes take place. From a set of prototypical features that define the concrete source domain, only some are metonymically selected in the extended meanings; then, these meanings undergo metaphorical processes.
This study is based on (the verbs of) the sense of touch. Data from Basque, Spanish and English will be drawn in order to carry out this analysis.
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