Functions of Language - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2015

This article has two aims: (i) to give an overview of research on sensory perceptions in different disciplines with different aims, and on the basis of that (ii) to encourage new research based on a balanced socio-sensory-cognitive approach. It emphasizes the need to study sensory meanings in human communication, both in Language with a capital L, focusing on universal phenomena, and across different languages, and within Culture with a capital C, such as parts of the world and political regions, and across different cultures, such as markets, production areas and aesthetic activities, in order to stimulate work resulting in more sophisticated, theoretically informed analyses of language use in general, and meaning-making of sensory perceptions in particular.

The paper explores language-internal variation in the referential meaning of the lexical form blue. Taking a usage-based cognitive approach, we analyze the referential range of blue in several marketing contexts from a semasiological and an onomasiological perspective. The study develops an interdisciplinary method that combines frequency analysis with mapping of the referent distributions in the three-dimensional CIELab color space. It is argued that the observed referential variation in blue is influenced by usage-related factors such as availability of the referents, diversity of color naming strategies and onomasiological competition between lexical forms in the individual product categories.

In this paper, I pursue the distributional hypothesis that the meaning of a word is derived from the linguistic contexts in which it occurs and apply it to verbs of perception. Differently from NLP implementations of the distributional hypothesis, I explicitly limit the range of variables to the grammatical domain and chart the way in which verbs of Vision, Hearing and Touch are used, morphologically and syntactically, in a representative sample of corpus data. Some aspects of experience are so central and pervasive that reference to them has grammaticalized (Divjak 2010; see also Janda & Lyashevskaya 2011; Newman 2008). The aim is, firstly, to determine to which extent a verb’s grammatical context alone allows us to classify utterances according to the perception type, and, secondly, to chart the similarities and differences in the verbs’ preference for morphological markers and syntactic constructions. If contexts are highly specialized, language structure, as it is witnessed in use, could assist sensory impaired speakers in building up viable representations of concepts, even if sensory experience is lacking. If, in addition, similarities between certain sensory perception verbs are high, sensory impaired speakers could use these similarities to perform analogical mapping across senses and ground concepts relating to the impaired sense in a cognate sensory experience. The findings are relevant for concept acquisition and representation in general and for concept acquisition and representation in sensory impaired populations, such as the blind, in particular.

In the existing literature on synaesthetic metaphors in poetry it is proposed that transfers tend to go from the ‘lower’ (touch, smell, taste) to the ‘higher’ (sight, hearing) sensory modalities. The purpose of this article is to establish if the same directionality also holds for synaesthetic associations found in other text types. To this end, a method for the semi-automatic extraction of synaesthesia is introduced and applied to general-purpose corpora of English (ukWaC) and Italian (itWaC). In the data collected for these languages, most transfers proceed in the expected direction, e.g. sweet voice, but instances of ‘backward’ transfers are also found, e.g. bitter cold. Based on these results, it is claimed that the ‘directionality principle’ reflects the frequency of association types, rather than representing universal constraints on synaesthetic transfers, as has often been more or less explicitly assumed. It is here argued that both properties of human perception and more strictly linguistic factors can account for the frequency tendencies observed in synaesthesia. The proposed interpretation is also shown to account for apparently contradictory evidence coming from typological studies on verbs of perception.

This paper presents an analysis of the field of perception verbs in Swedish within a typological and contrastive framework. Earlier work has to a great extent focused on the concepts see and hear. This article focuses on the more ‘raw’ form of perception represented by sensations and on the combination of meanings referring to perception and cognition in Swedish känna ‘feel, know’. The polysemy of känna turns out to be very language-specific even in relation to the most closely related Germanic languages. The polysemy of känna is interesting also because this verb can refer to internal (bodily) perception and has an extension that covers blended spaces combining cognitive elements with emotional and bodily feelings (cf. feel remorse, feel convinced). Special attention is paid also to sensory verbs describing sensations of light and sound (cf. English glitter, glimmer, rattle, creak, etc.) and of bodily sensations and pain (cf. ache, itch, etc.) Sensations are interesting because — similar to sensory adjectives — evaluation and intensity are central components of their meaning in addition to the fine-grained description of sensory qualia. There are great differences across languages in the degree of elaboration of sensory verbs referring to sensations. Recent typological work has demonstrated great elaborations of taste verbs in some languages, whereas other languages have elaborated odor verbs. Swedish (similar to many other European languages) has a rich repertoire of sound verbs.