Bodily sensation and embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese

Yin, Zhihua; Huang, Chu‐Ren; Dong, Sicong

doi:10.1353/jcl.2022.0008

Journal of Chinese Linguistics

2022

DOI: 10.1353/jcl.2022.0008

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Bodily sensation and embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese

Zhihua Yin¹,

Chu‐Ren Huang²,

Sicong Dong³

Abstract: Embodiment has been the tenet of several linguistic theories accounting for how language conceptualizes cognitive and bodily experiences. Studies on linguistic synesthesia and sensory lexicon strengthened the embodiment account by showing that the mapping patterns amongst sense modalities likewise exhibited a tendency from the more embodied to the less embodied. This paper reports a corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese to explore the interaction between embodied senses and conceptual … Show more

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2023

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Cited by 2 publications

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Rethinking basic taste terms

Luo

2023

CogLS

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The general consensus about four basic tastes, sweet, bitter, sour and salty, is rooted in Aristotle’s writings. This inventory was expanded with the addition of umami (or savoury) in the early years of last century, a taste that wasn’t fully scientifically recognized until the mid-1980s. Work on this area of human cognition from various fields – psychology, physiology, chemistry and particularly food science – has led to new discoveries that allow us to have a better understanding of the mechanism of taste. However, linguistic work on this aspect of human perception is lacking. Questions remain to be asked as to the size of the vocabulary of basic tastes, and how language can reflect the organization of the taste domain. This paper proposes to look at basic tastes by examining Chinese historical texts with an aim to reveal how the ancient Chinese people classified and categorized tastes. It will be demonstrated that the Chinese concept of “taste” boasts a long history, going back to pre-historic times. The word for “taste”, 味 wèi, can also refer to “smell; flavour.” The term is primarily used as a category noun, which gets borrowed into Japanese to become the head element -mi of the compound word umami in Japanese. Significantly, a form with a similar sound shape, 美 měi, was found in ancient Chinese with the meaning “tasty”, an adjective describing the taste, flavour of fresh meat, akin to “savoury.” This indicates that we are dealing with a morphological process or doublet in this semantic field. It also indicates that the idea of “good taste, tasty, savoury” existed long before that of umami. Equally important is the form with related meaning, 鲜 xiān, which is made up of two graphic forms, “fish” （鱼） + “lamb” （羊）. This form etymologically denotes the flavour of fresh fish, now carrying the sense of “fresh, delicious, tasty, savoury” in Chinese, which further illustrates the point. Still another form, 旨 zhǐ “(n) good flavour; pleasant taste,” is the source of the meaning of umami, as defined in Japanese dictionaries. Several other tastes are also analysed. Their implications for the expansion of basic tastes are discussed. The connections between the taste domain and olfaction domain are explored, with insights from some neighbouring languages.

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Rethinking basic taste terms

Luo

2023

CogLS

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Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors

Zhong

Ahrens

Huang

2023

Linguistics Vanguard

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Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). This study goes beyond examining the directionality of conventionalized synesthetic terms by adopting a Conceptual Metaphor Theory approach (i.e., the Conceptual Mapping Model) to test if conventional synesthetic directionality still holds when it comes to novel metaphorical expressions. The subjects, 308 native English speakers, are asked to judge the degree of commonness, appropriateness, understandability, and figurativeness in order to measure the degree of comprehensibility of novel synesthetic metaphors. Our findings demonstrate that novel synesthetic metaphors that follow conventional directionality are considered more common, more appropriate, and easier to comprehend than those that violate conventional mapping principles; they are also judged as more literal than those that do not follow conventional directionality. This study explores linguistic synesthesia from the perspective of comprehension of novel synesthetic metaphors, posits a pivotal position for mapping principles in synesthetic directionality, and supports an embodied account of linguistic synesthesia.

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Bodily sensation and embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese

Cited by 2 publications

References 28 publications

Rethinking basic taste terms

Rethinking basic taste terms

Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors

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