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. e 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 intro- duced 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’ re ects the frequency of association types, rather than representing uni- versal constraints on synaesthetic transfers, as has o en been more or less explic- itly 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. e proposed interpretation is also shown to account for apparently contradictory evidence coming from typological studies on verbs of perception

Being able to talk about what humans perceive with their senses is one of the fundamental capacities of language. But how do languages encode perceptual information? In this paper, we analyze how experiences from different senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) are encoded differentially across lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in the English language. Three independently collected lists of perception-related words show that sound concepts are more prone to being expressed as verbs. Data from an independent rating study furthermore shows that nouns rated to strongly relate to motion are also rated to strongly relate to sound, more so than is the case for color-related nouns. We argue that the association of verbs with sound is due to sound concepts being inherently more dynamic, motionrelated and event-based, in contrast to other sensory perceptions which are phenomenologically less strongly associated with motion and change. Overall, our results are the first to show differential encoding of perception-related concepts across different types of lexical categories. Our analyses of lexical patterns provide empirical evidence for the interconnection of semantics and grammar.

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a set of variables (part of speech, morphological structure, countability, etymology) and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences.

Research in (multi-)sensory marketing suggests that engaging consumers’ senses is an efficient way to create effective advertisements. In this study, the authors explore how sensory cues are used in print advertising. In particular, they identify and describe print advertisements featuring instances of synaesthesia, that is, a metaphor by which properties of a given sensory modality are attributed to a concept that relates primarily to a different sensory modality. They propose that these advertisements can be classified based on the role played by the image and the text, as well as based on the way visual and linguistic elements interact. They also outline how their contribution can set theoretical groundwork for the design of new empirical research questions in cognitive sciences and marketing studies.

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