Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2023

Abstract

Two opposed views dominate the color scene: Universalism and relativism. Each view has been shown to have fallen short of fully accounting for color perception and naming across languages and cultures. Beyond this controversy, the current article proposes cultural neuroscience as an alternative view to account for color naming and the conceptualization of experiences in color terms in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Cultural neuroscience accumulated massive cross-cultural empirical evidence to the effect that culture greatly impacts brain and cognition. The current article will draw on cultural neuroscience to explain the central role played by culture in shaping cognition and language. Thus, the argument will run as follows: The language in which color is cloaked owes much to experience in social cognition, which is greatly impacted by the cultural environment. This view implies that color naming is under the influence of the cultural needs of color users and cognizers in their respective cultures, with the language they speak as ancillary to culture. In TA, there are 11 color terms, with five focal colors including multiple shades and a form in mes– (–ish), reminiscent of English brownish from brown. Color naming in TA is conceptualized in terms of names of fruits (oranges, apricots, peaches, dates), plants (Jew’s mallow), aromatic plants (lavender), grains (wheat), birds (canary), seeds (pistachio), precious metals (gold), and substances (honey, coffee, chocolate, ash). Color is also manifest as a source domain in various metaphoric and metonymic expressions to conceptualize experiences and events using verbal, nominal, and adjectival derivations.

Abstract

This study explores the semantic and lexical extensions of the term for ‘black’ in Hindi by analyzing idiomatic expressions, compound words and culturally grounded metaphorical expressions from a cultural-cognitive perspective. The most commonly used Hindi term for black is kaala. The paper presents an analysis of 42 expressions with the term kaala (or its other morphological variants) in Hindi including idioms and compounds. The analysis finds that the color term extends to several experiential domains from emotions to morality and politics, usually signifying a negative aspect, but in some cases also a protection from negativity. It is found to be deep-rooted in Hindu mythology and grounds many a cultural belief. Several underlying metaphors are brought up by this analysis, many of which seem to be universal across languages, such as bad is black. But some metaphorical conceptualizations are found to be culture-specific, for instance the use of something black, like kaala tiika (black mark on the forehead or cheek), to counter the evil, and a goddess called kaali, said to have lethal powers. The analysis shows that the embodiment of human experience through the color ‘black’ has a substantial universal basis but at the same time, culture can lead to unique conceptualizations, as is the case with kaala.

Abstract

The relationship between visual experience and cognition manifested in the thinking/knowing/understanding is seeing metaphor, is claimed to be the primary vision metaphor in various languages. However, only a few studies considered its extension to less central domains such as cultural values. The paper seeks to understand how the figurative usages of Hungarian vision verbs refer to the cultural values of morality, respect, and hospitality. Three verbs of vision are invesitaged employing Cultural Linguistic and cognitive semantic analyses, namely, néz ‘look/watch’, lát ‘see’, and tekint ‘look/glance’. It is demonstrated that visual perception in Hungarian has a significant role in moral reasoning; however, there are substantial differences in the ways these vision verbs relate to them. To find a motivational explanation for these differences, the semantic properties of the verbs are identified through contrastive analysis and by observing their semantic profiles within the vision scenario. As a result, a cultural model of each verb is reconstructed. The study gives a refined view on the linkage of sight and cultural values in Hungarian, furthermore, the proposed methodology can be effectively applied to various areas of perception research in a cultural context.

Abstract

The central question of the paper is whether visual perception serves as a grounding cognitive act for experiencing and reflecting on the other in elegiac poetry. I assume that elegy has a cultural scheme in which the lyric subject can see the environment not only from his own point of view but also from the perspective of the other, and this mental contextualization has reoccurring linguistic patterns (e.g.,the expressions of retrospection/looking backwards, or looking to the natural environment from different points of view) in elegiac tradition. For testing the assumption, I use corpus-based analysing methods: in a quantitative analysis a specific research corpus is built from canonical Hungarian elegies, and it is analysed with Lancsbox with the aim of identifying the characteristic linguistic construction of visual perception. I explore the distribution and the collocational patterns of the Hungarian verbs lát ‘see’, néz ‘look’ and figyel ‘watch’ in the elegy corpus, and keyword analysis is made with the use of a reference corpus built from Hungarian odes.

Abstract

People often see what they want to see (or hear, or taste, etc.), i.e., our mind imperceptibly edits our actual sensations. Culture may function, metaphorically speaking, as a pair of glasses that filters light, because it may be tinted, or have different lenses. In this article we study how visual sensations are filtered and edited, either reduced or enriched, so as to produce perceptions fitting the cultural models we have, and how this interaction is reflected in semiotic systems, i.e., in visual, multimodal, and verbal-gestural communication. Accordingly, we offer three case studies in which we demonstrate the claim that variably articulated cultural models (often networks of related cultural models) we have influence whether, and how, we experience something as being of metaphorical or metonymic nature.

Abstract

Applying conceptual metaphor theory, this study aims to discuss how metaphors emerge from the interaction between perceptual experience and cultural environment, comparing English and Chinese. The kind of metaphors under study is rooted in the object image schema, particularly in its dimension in solidity with bipolar values as hard and soft. Specifically, these are primary metaphors grounded in experiential correlations in manipulating physical objects that are hard or soft. It is argued that the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in such metaphorical mappings can be accounted for by four main meaning focuses consisting in four pairs of parametric variables: more or less effort, more or less impact, more or less strength, and more or less flexibility. These parametric variables determine metaphorical mapping pathways from hard and soft as source concepts to some abstract target concepts.

Abstract

The general consensus about four basic tastes, sweet, bitter, sour and salty, is rooted in Aristotle’s writings. This inventory was expanded with the addition of umami (or savoury) in the early years of last century, a taste that wasn’t fully scientifically recognized until the mid-1980s. Work on this area of human cognition from various fields – psychology, physiology, chemistry and particularly food science – has led to new discoveries that allow us to have a better understanding of the mechanism of taste. However, linguistic work on this aspect of human perception is lacking. Questions remain to be asked as to the size of the vocabulary of basic tastes, and how language can reflect the organization of the taste domain. This paper proposes to look at basic tastes by examining Chinese historical texts with an aim to reveal how the ancient Chinese people classified and categorized tastes. It will be demonstrated that the Chinese concept of “taste” boasts a long history, going back to pre-historic times. The word for “taste”, 味 wèi, can also refer to “smell; flavour.” The term is primarily used as a category noun, which gets borrowed into Japanese to become the head element -mi of the compound word umami in Japanese. Significantly, a form with a similar sound shape, 美 měi, was found in ancient Chinese with the meaning “tasty”, an adjective describing the taste, flavour of fresh meat, akin to “savoury.” This indicates that we are dealing with a morphological process or doublet in this semantic field. It also indicates that the idea of “good taste, tasty, savoury” existed long before that of umami. Equally important is the form with related meaning, 鲜 xiān, which is made up of two graphic forms, “fish” （鱼） + “lamb” （羊）. This form etymologically denotes the flavour of fresh fish, now carrying the sense of “fresh, delicious, tasty, savoury” in Chinese, which further illustrates the point. Still another form, 旨 zhǐ “(n) good flavour; pleasant taste,” is the source of the meaning of umami, as defined in Japanese dictionaries. Several other tastes are also analysed. Their implications for the expansion of basic tastes are discussed. The connections between the taste domain and olfaction domain are explored, with insights from some neighbouring languages.

Abstract

The article focuses on the conventionalized cross-sensory uses of basic-level adjectives in a sample of eight languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Tajik, and Uzbek. After a differentiation of cross-sensory language use (also called linguistic synesthesia) from other phenomena that combine the senses (namely, neuropsychological synesthesia and cross-sensory correspondences), it reports on a dictionary-based semantic analysis that distinguishes between three main semantic mechanisms leading to cross-sensory language use: direct cross-sensory transfer (e.g., a dark sound), more schematic generalized meanings (e.g., soft ‘pleasant, gentle, not too intense’), and highly figurative extensions (e.g., a dark melody, in which dark means ‘gloomy’). It also emphasizes that these three categories are often intertwined due to the inherent fog-like nature of meaning. After summarizing every instance of conventionalized cross-sensory meaning potential that could be found in the dictionaries, it concludes that (1) the results are in line with the widely observed directional preferences also referred to as the hierarchy of the senses; (2) the evaluative dimension is present in many transfers, but it cannot account for the extended uses alone; (3) there are some obvious differences between the Western and the Central Asian languages, even though one cannot speak of fundamentally different conceptual systems regarding the language of the senses. Besides these general observations, the outcomes of this principally exploratory investigation also point to many uncharted territories to be examined in future studies.

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