The English lexicon is quite impoverished in capturing the perceptual detail of odour qualities. To make up for the lack of smell vocabulary, speakers will often resort to source-based descriptions, a strategy that likens smells to real-world reference points, like ‘mint’. This study examines the instances when Australian English speakers use particular communicative strategies, to explore whether cultural or cognitive influences allow for the easier abstraction of odour qualities. This study combines (1) an odour description task, and (2) a similarity-based sorting task. The results of (1) show that the communicative preferences for describing smells are indeed reliant on source-based descriptions, and the results of (2) show that conceptualisation of odours is primarily based on hedonic valence, and secondarily on salient scents. By combining these results, I find that the communicative preferences vary depending on the conceptualisations of a scent. Scents judged as pleasant receive relatively more abstract descriptions, like ‘sweet’, and show a higher degree of agreement, and the source-based descriptions are particularly frequent among culturally salient scents.

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The sense of smell has been relatively neglected in the Western research. It is not regarded as particularly useful compared to the perceived importance of senses like sight, sound, and touch. Correspondingly, English speakers are ill-equipped to describe qualities of smells, instead invoking entities that share similar olfactory qualities, e.g. like roses. This raises the question: which odours do English speakers frequently refer to, and which terms describe them? This corpus-driven study looks at nouns in olfactory contexts, and the conceptual domains they fall into. Results show that speakers invoke different smells according to context: when talking about a smell they perceive, when describing a smell, or in a description of another smell, which demonstrates the differential communicative functions of smells. Further analysis shows that smells that are described are more variable than those used as descriptors, and smells being used to describe are more emotional using psychometric norming data.