Sensory Linguistics

Language, perception and metaphor

Author

Bodo Winter

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027203106 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027262622 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are “ineffable”? And what are appropriate methods for studying the sensory aspects of linguistics? After a broad overview of the field, a detailed quantitative corpus-based study of English sensory adjectives and their metaphorical uses is presented. This analysis calls age-old ideas into question, such as the idea that the use of perceptual metaphors is governed by a cognitively motivated “hierarchy of the senses”. Besides making theoretical contributions to cognitive linguistics, this research monograph showcases new empirical methods for studying lexical semantics using contemporary statistical methods.

[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 20] 2019. xiv, 289 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.20

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments | pp. xiii–xiv

Chapter 1. Sensory linguistics: Introduction to the book | pp. 1–7

Part I. Theory

Chapter 2. The five senses folk model | pp. 11–15

Chapter 3. Sensory semiotics | pp. 17–30

Chapter 4. Ineffability | pp. 31–49

Chapter 5. The Embodied Lexicon Hypothesis | pp. 51–65

Chapter 6. Synesthesia and metaphor | pp. 67–77

Chapter 7. Synesthetic metaphors are not metaphorical | pp. 79–97

Chapter 8. The hierarchy of the senses | pp. 99–103

Chapter 9. Explaining the hierarchy of the senses | pp. 105–119

Part II. A case study of sensory adjectives

Chapter 10. Methodological foundations | pp. 123–140

Chapter 11. Norming the senses | pp. 141–152

Chapter 12. Dominance relations and specialization of sensory words | pp. 153–162

Chapter 13. Correlations and clusters | pp. 163–174

Chapter 14. Semantic preferences of sensory words | pp. 175–186

Chapter 15. Frequency, semantic complexity, and iconicity | pp. 187–197

Chapter 16. The evaluative dimension | pp. 199–211

Chapter 17. Re-evaluating the hierarchy of the senses | pp. 213–232

Part III. Conclusion

Chapter 18. Conclusion | pp. 235–247

References | pp. 249–285

Index | pp. 287–289

“ Sensory Linguistics: Language, perception and metaphor is an amazing, incredibly thoughtful book that paves a brilliant path forward in our scholarly understanding of the sensory, embodied, foundations for perception, thought, and language. Bodo Winter provides a rich set of descriptive, theoretical, and methodological considerations for uncovering the sensory basis of language and linguistic meaning, with particular focus on synesthesia and metaphor. I was impressed by Winter’s numerous novel arguments and insights and how these offer a new vision of the relations between linguistic and sensory experience. This book is cognitive science at its best!”

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. is author of “The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding,” and “Metaphor wars: Conceptual metaphor in human life.”

“[T]his book provides a comprehensive and insightful discussion of the correspondences between language and perception using reproducible empirical methods. In particular, it attaches great importance to looking for converging evidence throughout the book, which has been emphasized, until recently, in Cognitive Linguistics (Kövecses, 2011). What is discovered about sensory adjectives in this study is consistent with the existing empirical findings in neuroscience and psycholinguistics.”

Jie Huang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in Interaction Studies 21:2 (2020).

“Being exquisitely well written, this publication, with clarity and wit, helps us acquire a deep understanding of the matter and makes it both an informative and an unusually pleasant reading. The organization of the whole book is quite clearcut and each section has been coherently related. The clarity of explanation, the relatively straightforward language used and the numerous examples make the book accessible to a broad audience.”

Rong Wang, Hangzhou Dianzi University, in Folia Linguistica 2020; 54(1): pp. 269–275

“I believe that Bodo Winter’s monograph is a valuable and important book for all researchers dealing with perception in language. The reader gets exactly what the author promises in the introduction – a synthetic and critical review of the most important research threads in sensory linguistics. The author has done enormous work by gathering an exceptionally extensive and interdisciplinary literature on the subject and analyzing the linguistic material in detail. The monograph is very informative; it requires slow and careful reading because each paragraph can bring something new and surprising to the reader. At the same time, the book opens new research perspectives and provokes further questions.”

Magdalena Zawisławska, University of Warsaw, in Metaphor and the Social World, 12:1 (2022).

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