Linguistic Confusion Of Sour And Bitter Tastes

The book illustrates how the human ability to adapt to the environment and interact with it can explain our linguistic representation of the world as constrained by our bodies and sensory perception. The different chapters discuss philosophical, scientific, and linguistic perspectives on embodiment and body perception, highlighting the core mechanisms humans employ to acquire knowledge of reality. These processes are based on sensory experience and interaction through communication.

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.

There is a perceived tension between empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Many recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an 'empirical science'. This volume argues for a nuanced view, highlighting that theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. Its contributions – ranging from experimental studies in psychology via linguistic fieldwork and cross-linguistic comparisons to the application of formal and logical approaches to language – exemplify the mutual relationship between empirical and theoretical work. The volume illustrates how selected topics are addressed by different contributions and methodological stances. Topics include the cognitive grounding of language, social cognition and the construction of meaning in interaction, and, closely related, pragmatics from a typological perspective and beyond. Anyone interested in these topics and more generally in meta-theoretical considerations will find great value in this volume.

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. The chapters explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information; what kinds of objects individuals perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event; how many senses people have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful.

'The Sense of Taste' is a treatise on the gustatory system by two Columbia University psychologists, H. L. Hollingworth and A. T. Poffenberger. The authors regarded the sense of taste to be in numerous ways the most paradoxical of all the senses. Although, as a source of sense impression, it can afford the keenest immediate feelings of pleasure and delight, the books on aesthetics and art have little or nothing to say about it. Skill in the compounding of tastes and flavors, or discrimination in their relish, brings the expert neither artistic recognition nor social eminence. Taste, it is constantly asserted, is one of the "lower senses," and neither in the enjoyment of it nor the ministration to it is there to be acquired the merit and general esteem that readily distinguish an art from a service.