Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies

Abstract

Abstract:To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception.

Smell Is Coded in Grammar and Frequent in Discourse: Cha'palaa Olfactory Language in Cross‐Linguistic Perspective

“…Overall, our analysis of verb frequency recapitulates the findings of San Roque et al. (): vision verbs dominate in conversation, while touch, taste, and smell are less frequent than would be expected if all senses were equally salient. The trend is further confirmed by the inclusion of Imbabura Quechua in the comparison, which was not included in San Roque et al.…”

“…The trend is further confirmed by the inclusion of Imbabura Quechua in the comparison, which was not included in San Roque et al. (). We also confirmed the unusual rank order of Cha'palaa—i.e., smell has a much higher ranking than in other languages—using a substantially larger corpus.…”

“…In this comparison, Cha'palaa ranked the sense of smell higher relative to all other languages except for Semai (San Roque et al. ), one of the Aslian languages noted for their olfactory language (Tufvesson ). In addition, developing a full account of Cha'palaa smell terms revealed that the most frequent terms andyu “fragrance” and pudyu “stench”, are just two members of a larger set of abstract smell quality terms, all of which are formed with the morpheme ‐dyu , which grammatically classifies the resulting term as a type of smell.…”

“…With large enough corpora, it is also possible to gain insights about the relative hierarchy of the senses by comparing discourse frequency across languages (e.g., San Roque et al. ; Winter ). In this section we look beyond language structure, and compare the frequencies and types of expressions of olfactory experience found in discourse.…”

Map Classification In Image Data

“…Seeing is an essential skill for most creatures (Horridge, 1987) and it is the most important human sense for information gathering (San Roque et al, 2015). Therefore, it is not surprising that an essential part of the mentioned increase of digital data is represented by visual data, as shown in Figure 1.1.…”