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The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity
Edited by Łukasz Jędrzejowski and Przemysław Staniewski
[Typological Studies in Language 131] 2021
► pp. 73–112

The domain of olfaction in Basque

This chapter analyzes the domain of olfaction in Basque. Stemming from Ibarretxe-Antuñano’s (1999, 2013) previous work on smell verbs, it explores the role of other olfaction constructions in the encoding of physical and figurative meanings in data drawn from dictionaries and corpora. Results show that smell constructions encode two types of physical perceptual meaning and then develop their figurative meanings accordingly. Copulative perception is related to characteristics and feelings; active / experience perception to information, cognition, and search. Negative connotations usually associated to this sense (i.e. ‘to suspect’) do not necessarily hold in Basque. With respect to usage, few of these smell words are frequently used in present-day Basque, and some of them have undergone specialization and narrowing processes.
Keywords: smell, perception, metaphor, Basque, olfactory vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Olfactory expressions: The case of smell verbs in Basque
  • 3.Beyond verbs: Smell nouns in Basque
  • 4.The semantic scope of olfactory vocabulary
    • 4.1Physical meanings
    • 4.2Figurative meanings
  • 5.Just a word on the use of olfactory vocabulary
  • 6.Final remarks and future work: smell in language and culture
  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • Dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.131.03iba
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