Making sense of sensory perceptions across languages and cultures
Carita Paradis2015, Functions of Language
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Abstract
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. Keywords: semantics, discourse, evidentiality, conceptual preference hierarchy, socio-sensory-cognitive triad, metaphor, metonymy, vision, sight, smell, taste, touch, texture, olfactory, gustatory.
Key takeaways
- This volume sets out to strike a better balance between perception and cognition in the context of language by taking a closer look at the core of the matter of embodiment, namely sensory perceptions, exploring how speakers of different languages and different cultures use language to describe visual experiences, smell, taste, texture and sound.
- Exploring a range of the linguistic resources used to describe sensory experience, Paradis & Eeg-Olofsson (2013) question views of sensory perception as primed by one sense at a time and the existence of a one-to-one relationship between sensory descriptors and sensory perceptions.
- An important source of inspiration for a great deal of various types of sensory research comes from Ullmann's (1957) classical study of synaesthesia in poetry, where he proposes a hierarchy and a directional principle of sensory perceptions in metaphorical extensions from lower to higher sense modalities, i.e. from touch > taste > smell to sound and vision.
- Interesting observations have been made regarding the ways the members of such communities express themselves to overcome the alleged scarcity of specific sensory terms for describing sensory experiences.
- It is therefore, of particular interest to be able to examine the functioning of our brains in relations to sensory language and cognition, psychological responses to sensory communication and issues related to aesthetics and emotions, since such responses may have powerful societal effects on people's behaviour in different situations.
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This website and the materials herewith supplied have been developed by members of the Language and Cognition Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (formerly the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group). In a number of cases materials were designed in collaboration with staff from other MPI departments. Any use of the materials should be acknowledged in publications, presentations and other public materials. Entries have been developed by different individuals. Please cite authors as indicated on the webpage and front page of the pdf entry. Use of associated stimuli should also be cited by acknowledging the field manual entry. Intellectual property rights are hereby asserted. This material is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to share (copy, redistribute) the material in any medium or format, and you are free to adapt (remix, transform, build upon) the material, under the following terms: you must give appropriate credit in the form of a citation to the original material; you may not use the material for commercial purposes; and if you adapt the material, you must distribute your contribution under the same license as the original.
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