Tastes We Live By

The Linguistic Conceptualisation of Taste in English

Marco Bagli

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783111255767
• eBook ISBN: 9783110626865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds.

In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience index of gustatory terms in both American and British English. The second part of the book is an overview of the metaphorical extensions that motivate the polysemy of Taste terms, with the aid of corpus analysis methods and various texts.

This book is the first to review systematically and in a usage-based perspective the role of the sensory domain of Taste in English, showing a more complicated picture and suggesting that its under-representation and difficulty of encoding does not correspond to lack of importance.

1 Introduction and theoretical tenets

1.1 Cognitive linguistics

There are many animal species that show signs of communication, some of them even display signs of sophisticated and refined exchange of information between individuals. Among them, only humans “speak”. The complexity of our communicative strategies has developed over millennia of physical and cultural evolution. This dynamic development has involved not only humans, but also other life forms that share our environment, including non-human animals, bacteria, and plants. Currently, each human being is an individual belonging to the species Homo sapiens, the only extant species in the genus Homo. This has not always been true: there have been moments in the past when more than one species of humans coexisted and even interbred, as testified by our DNA (e.g., Vernot and Akey 2014; Browning et al. 2018).

According to recent estimates, Homo sapiens developed in Africa around 100,000 years ago. In this relatively short span of time, we have reached unimaginable achievements thanks to our capacity to cooperate and exchange information. One of the most outstanding accomplishments is the diversity of human languages around the globe. Despite the recent threats to linguistic diversity, there are more than 6000 different languages with which individuals communicate daily about the most different topics. The variety of these languages is overwhelming at different levels: syntactic, phonetic, and lexical. Some of these languages even defy the prototypical definition of language: for example, Sign Languages lack a sound and oral component, while others developed to communicate across long distances, like whistled languages (e.g., Meyer 2008). These are languages – a code with which a species communicates – nonetheless, and all of them share some basic cognitive mechanisms that are wired in Homo sapiens’ brains.

According to Cognitive Linguistics, the neural underpinnings of language perception and production are not unique to language, which “is not an autonomous cognitive faculty” (Croft and Cruse 2004: 1). The human ability to rely on language has evolved and has been built upon previous mechanisms of non-linguistic reasoning and cognitive processing (Tomasello 2008; Orians 2018), and as such, it relies on these mechanisms to function. Moreover, cognitive linguists have turned to the study and insights provided by other disciplines (such as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, anthropology, philosophy, biology) to account for mechanisms observed at a linguistic level. Despite being originally focused on semantics and meaning creation, Cognitive Linguistics and its interdisciplinary nature account for a wide array of linguistic phenomena, e.g., syntactic variation, phonetic realisations, socio-linguistic descriptions, and lexicography. As such, Cognitive Linguistics is best described as a dynamic approach to the study of language, and it originated as a reaction to previously widespread theories of language.

The recognition that language relies on other more general cognitive faculties implies that in order to describe language and linguistic phenomena one should look into general mechanisms that may also be independent of language. The units that constitute our linguistic system are thought to represent concepts in our minds, although the nature of this relationship is a matter of debate (for a comprehensive discussion, see Speed, Vinson, and Vigliocco 2015). A linguist who wishes to describe language in the cognitive framework should take into account the conceptual structure that underlies the linguistic phenomena under scrutiny, and this should be done in keeping with knowledge of the cognitive architecture of the human mind (e.g., Dąbrowska and Divjak 2015).

A second crucial aspect of the Cognitive Linguistic approach is the hypothesis that “knowledge of language emerges from language use” (Croft and Cruse 2004: 1). Any thoughts and theories about different languages, about their structures and their grammars should emerge from linguistic data observed in their “natural” occurrence. This means that cognitive linguists collect and analyse linguistic data produced by native speakers, in what is often referred to as a usage-based approach. Linguistic data may come either from elicited tests, or from large collections of text such as corpora.

Lastly, Cognitive Linguistics argues that language evolved to convey meaning. Any component of the linguistic systems deployed by the meaning-making ape (Evans 2015) conveys meaning, from grammatical structures to phonetic units. According to cognitive linguists, meaning is created through construal operations (Croft and Cruse 2004: 40–73), it is structured by our encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, and it is embodied. Construal operations are cognitive mechanisms that intervene also in other cognitive skills, such as our capacity for attention, memory, perception, and reasoning. Construal operations are dynamic, and they may occur together in our processing of language. As a consequence, different linguists may concentrate on different aspects of the same meaning-making structure. For instance, consider the example in (1):

(1)

Our relationship went sour.

In order to understand the meaning of the utterance in (1), our minds and conceptual systems need to perform a number of cognitive operations and rely on language-independent resources. The consensus in Cognitive Linguistics is to regard (1) as figurative, an umbrella term that is used in contemporary discussion to refer to all the types of conceptualisations that are not literal, thus involving metaphors, metonymies, and/ or a combination or continuum across the two. The labelling of these phenomena as figurative should not be mistaken with previous accounts of metaphors as a figure of speech or rhetorical device in language and in literary critique. After the seminal book by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By, conceptual metaphors within the Cognitive Linguistics tradition are understood as cognitive mechanisms and not purely as linguistic devices. They are a fundamental mechanism through which our minds create meaning. Therefore, in order to understand the meaning in (1), our brains need to activate a metaphorical mechanism with which our conceptual systems are endowed. Nonetheless, it is legit to ask: what is metaphorical about (1)?

There are at least two possible answers. The usage of the verb went in the construction in (1) is an instantiation of the event-frame, according to which change is motion. This means that our understanding of both concrete and abstract change may be conceptualised as movement from one state to another. A non-figurative rephrasing of (1) could therefore be:

(2)

Our relationship changed to sour.

Although sentence (2) has been reformulated to avoid the metaphorical conceptualisation of change as motion, we still need some figurative mechanisms to understand it. If we understood (2) as literal, it would not make much sense: how could a relationship possibly be sour?

In the English linguistic system, sour is an adjective that describes one of the basic taste sensations, alongside sweet, bitter, and salty. Prototypically, it is elicited by unripe fruit and vinegar; the by-products of fermentation may also elicit a sour taste (such as yeast: ever wondered why sourdough is sour?); and most notably spoiled foods taste sour, for instance milk (as in sour cream). Although sour cream is appreciated for its culinary qualities, spoilage of milk may have represented a considerable and frequent problem in ancient societies. It represents a potential threat for our bodies and a loss of valuable food products. Luckily, our senses evolved to avoid this type of threat. Furthermore, our conceptual systems store information of the danger of sour milk in our encyclopaedic knowledge, which is what enables us to understand the second layer of conceptual meaning in (1), namely spoilage is sour. Considering this information, we are able to interpret the meaning of (1) correctly, and to infer that the relationship in question is spoiled and no longer pleasant.

In Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the mappings across two domains that arise directly in correlation of experience are frequently referred to as primary metaphors (e.g., Grady 1997a). A good example is more is up, where more is not always up, yet the experience of something piling vertically is correlated to the experience of an increase in volume, resulting in the conceptual projection of quantity with verticality. This is confirmed also in experience as we pour a liquid in a container and see the level rise. Hence, the relationship between spoilage and sour may be considered a primary metaphor given their direct correlation in everyday experience and encyclopaedic knowledge; thus this type of repeated experience becomes entrenched (see Paragraph 3.5)

We may further extend the reasoning onto the relationship that holds between the concepts of spoilage and sour and consider the two as part of the same event structure. In Chapter 8, I argue that the relationship between the two concepts is not only metaphorical – as much as it is metonymic. In this case, we can say that (1) is motivated by the metonymy sour for spoilage. In conceptual metonymy phrasing, I understand for as an abbreviation of stands for. This in turn is in alternative phrasing to the current definition of metonymy, which is precisely a provides mental access to b (Barcelona 2003: 32–33; Kövecses 2010: 176; Sandford 2021). What is the metonymic construal of utterance (1)? If we understand perception as a Gestalt, a unified account of a sensory event (see e.g., Lakoff 1987 on ICMs³) we may think of sour as the vehicle to access a larger concept, namely that of spoilage. Our embodied correlation of experience informs our encyclopaedic knowledge, according to which sour is the prototypical property of spoilt foods (such as milk). The relationship between sour and spoilage therefore may also be described as metonymic, thus giving rise to a different account of the processes involved in (1).

The difference between metaphors and metonymies is subtle, but substantial. Barcelona (2003) proposes an account according to which metaphors may be based on metonymic relationships, and metonymies may spring out of metaphorical relationships, thus suggesting a high level of dynamic, conceptual interplay and integration between the two construal operations. Pérez-Sobrino (2017: 7–8) exemplifies the difference between conceptual metaphors and metonymy by equating metaphors to bridges, and metonymies t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction and theoretical tenets
• 2 Taste
• 3 The words of taste
• 4 The semantic domain of taste in English
• 5 The multisensory lexicon of taste
• 6 Categorisation patterns
• 7 The taste of words
• 8 The taste of words today
• 9 Intrafield metaphors
• 10 Conclusions
• Index