Semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian) is spoken by an ethnic group belonging to the Orang Asli population on Peninsular Malaysia. In Semai, the main category of words encoding sensory perception is the distinct formal and functional class of expressives. Semai expressives convey speakers’ sensory and perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, and are often governed by speakers’ first-person experience of a situation. The expressive vocabulary displays a rich inventory of linguistic iconicity (primary and secondary), with sound symbolic mappings between form and meaning. Through motivated form-meaning mappings in the shape of sound symbolic templates, speakers use analogy to capture parallels across different and/or similar perceptual experiences, either within or across different sensory domains. This talk will focus on such analogy making in the sensory domains of colour, smell and sound, as well as the use of expressives to convey cross-modal sensory information.