Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is optimized for usage

Winter, Bodo; Perlman, Marcus; Majid, Asifa

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.008

Cited by 126 publications

(107 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, Strik Lievers finds that the 'directionality principle' proposed initially by Ullmann (1957) "reflects the frequency of association types, rather than representing universal constraints on synaesthetic transfers, as has often been more or less explicitly assumed" (2015). Winter et al (2018) also find that higher frequency of visual words in a corpora analysis reflects lexical differentiation for the visual domain in the English lexicon. It seems natural that a greater number of unique words for a given domain is indicative of how that language construes the entrenchment of that domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…Investigation has been carried out both on the single domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight (e.g. Howes 2005;Gisborne 2010;Caballero & Diaz Vera 2013;Winter 2016;Digonnet 2016;Baicchi et al 2018;Winter et al 2018), but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena (Cacciari 2008;Cuskley & Kirby 2013;Strik-Lievers 2015;Ronga 2016). Linguistic transfer between various senses seem to respect a hierarchy from those that have been historically considered the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher (hearing and sight), forming the following sense hierarchy from the less to the most physiologically differentiated: touch > (temperature) 1 > taste > smell > hearing > sight.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taste and sight

Sandford

2019

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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Embodiment is central to the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis. We receive the information of the world around us through the bodily sensations; i.e. we perceive, then process and conceptualize it. Research into the sensory domains has continued to elicit further examination of how we use metaphoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Investigation has been carried out both on the single sense domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. Linguistic transfer between various senses seems to respect a hierarchy from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hearing and sight), even though some variation of this hierarchy has been noted. The present study is the first part of a two-fold analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of taste and sight. The objective is to verify what collocations occur between the two domains: do they respect the hierarchy, and how frequent, or how strong are they? Corpus analysis of the construction of the adjective + noun type are in keeping with existing literature: the sensory domain that functions as source is understood as an adjective modifying another sensory domain, which is found  This research was made possible through research funds from the University of Perugia and an "Erasmus+" Teaching Mobility grant. I would like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek, especially Mario Brdar, Marinja Omazić, and Tanja Gradečak, with the many other people involved, for ther kind and thoughtful support. Furthermore, I would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments, any outstanding errors remain my own. Jodi L. Sandford: Taste and sight: A corpus analysis of English adjective-noun constructionsin the form of a noun. This research concentrates on cross-modal pairs found through a corpus-based analysis of taste adjectives in the description of vision nouns, e.g. delicious colors. Linguistic data were retrieved from corpora that allow for comparison of the actual usage and definition of these constructions. These include the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of English. The experimental methodology is in keeping with the usage-based approach of Cognitive Linguistics, considering frequency and relevance.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste and sight

Sandford

2019

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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“…Strik Lievers & Winter (2018) discuss how the encoding of sensory concepts varies across parts of speech. A related study by Winter et al (2018) shows that vision dominates in English if all types of sensory words are taken into account but point out that this does not generalize across all cultures. In a broad and well-documented typological study based on 20 diverse languages, Majid et al (2018b) show that the degree to which sensory domains are richly or poorly coded varies across languages: "For each perceptual modality, there are communities that excel at linguistic expression and those that seem to struggle to put them into words" (Majid et al 2018b: 11374).…”

Section: Verbmentioning

confidence: 97%

Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective

Viberg¹

2020

Syntaxe &Amp; Sémantique

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The article starts with a brief review of current studies of perception verbs as a background to the major part of the paper, which is devoted to a discussion of Phenomenon-based perception verbs. Three broad types are distinguished: sensory copulas, perceptibility verbs and sensory verbs. Verbs of these types appear across the five sense modalities. The categorization is tested on data from a translation corpus consisting of Swedish original novels translated into English, German, French and Finnish. The paper focuses on vision and audition, in particular the Swedish sensory copula verbs se ut "look" (e.g. "look happy") and låta "sound" and their translations. In the prototypical meaning, these verbs combine the reference to a sense modality with a modal or evidential component (roughly: SEEM). One of these components can be bleached to various degrees depending on the grammatical context. It turns out that French to a much greater extent than the other languages uses verbs that are unmarked for the sense modality. The place of the result within a general typological framework is briefly discussed. Perceptual verbs referring to an Experience such as see and hear follow a universal lexicalization hierarchy, whereas the structuring of Phenomenon-based verbs is typologically variable. Résumé : Cet article commence par passer brièvement en revue les études actuelles des verbes de perception afin de contextualiser son propos, qui s'attache essentiellement aux verbes de perception orientés vers l'objet perçu. Trois grands types de verbes sont distingués : les copules sensorielles, les verbes de perceptibilité et les verbes sensoriels. Des verbes de ce type se rencontrent pour chacun des cinq sens. La classification est mise à l'épreuve des données issues d'un corpus de traduction, qui met en regard des romans suédois et leurs traductions en anglais, allemand, français et finnois. L'étude se concentre sur la vision et l'audition, en particulier sur les copules sensorielles du suédois se ut et låta et leurs traductions. Dans leur sens prototypique, ces verbes combinent une référence à un type de perception sensorielle et une composante modale ou évidentielle (schématiquement : SEMBLER). L'une de ces deux1. I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for fruitful critical comments and Rea Peltola and Flavie Feray for valuable comments on the analysis of Finnish and French. Remaining mistakes are my own responsibility.

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“…Many languages, like English, have elaborate vocabularies for colors, light events, and verbs of visual perception (e.g. Majid et al, 2018, Winter, et al, 2018. What is the nature of such verbally acquired knowledge, and exactly how do blind individuals learn from language?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Furry hippos and scaly sharks: Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults

Js¹,

Gv²,

M³

2019

Preprint

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How does first-person sensory experience contribute to knowledge? Contrary to the suppositions of empiricist philosophers, people who are blind know about phenomena that cannot be perceived directly, such as color and light. Do blind individuals learn about appearance primarily by remembering sighted people's descriptions of what they see (e.g. "elephants are grey")? How is "verbally-acquired" knowledge about perception represented? We compared knowledge of animal appearance across congenitally blind (n=20) and sighted individuals (two groups, n=20 and n=35). Participants performed a battery of tasks, including ordering animals by size and height and sorting by shape, skin texture, and color (animal names presented in Braille or print). If people who are blind learn primarily from verbal description, blind and sighted groups should share less knowledge about perceptual dimensions that are more difficult to verbalize. We quantified verbalizability by applying the Simpson's Diversity Index to participant labels of shape, texture and color sorting piles. Disagreement across groups was apparent for all dimensions tested, suggesting that visual perception and language convey partially non-redundant information.Contrary to the idea that blind individuals learn primarily from verbal descriptions, blind and sighted groups disagreed most on the dimension that was easiest to verbalize: animal color. Analysis of disagreement patterns suggests that blind individuals infer physical features from other animal properties, such as folk taxonomy and habitat (e.g. bats are shaped like birds but textured like mammals). In the absence of sensory access, structured appearance knowledge is acquired through inference. Significance StatementWe learn about the world through our senses (e.g., we might find out that elephants are grey by seeing one in a zoo). However, sensory experience (e.g., vision) is not always necessary-even people born blind have knowledge about color and light. How is appearance information acquired in the absence of sensory access? A seemingly obvious idea is that blind individuals learn from sighted people's verbal descriptions. We compared blind and sighted people's knowledge of the appearance of common animals and find instead that individuals who are blind infer appearance from other properties (e.g. taxonomy and habitat). In the absence of direct sensory access, knowledge of appearance is acquired primarily through inference, rather than through memorization of verbally-stipulated facts.

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Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is optimized for usage

Cited by 126 publications

References 73 publications

Taste and sight

Taste and sight

Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective

Furry hippos and scaly sharks: Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults

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