One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are “ineffable”? And what are appropriate methods for studying the sensory aspects of linguistics? After a broad overview of the field, a detailed quantitative corpus-based study of English sensory adjectives and their metaphorical uses is presented. This analysis calls age-old ideas into question, such as the idea that the use of perceptual metaphors is governed by a cognitively motivated “hierarchy of the senses”. Besides making theoretical contributions to cognitive linguistics, this research monograph showcases new empirical methods for studying lexical semantics using contemporary statistical methods.

Sensory Adjectives in the Discourse of Food presents a frame-based analysis of sensory descriptors. This book investigates the identification and usefulness of conceptual frames in three respects: First, an analysis of scientific language use shows that a semantic interpretation of the adjectives is dependent on the operationalizations performed in the field of sensory science. Second, a systematic frame semantic analysis of the descriptors sheds light on how meaning is constructed with regard to the lexemes’ wider context, from the utterance to the text type. Third, a comparison with German descriptors tests the applicability of a frame from one language to another (English – German). Framing presents itself as a means to capture the knowledge representation that underlies a particular discourse. With its detailed linguistic analyses and its interdisciplinary treatment of framing across discourse (specialized vs. public discourse), this book is interesting for researchers working within cognitive linguistics, terminology, and sensory science.

Sensory Experiences: Exploring meaning and the senses describes the collective elaboration of a situated cognitive approach with an emphasis on the relations between language and cognition within and across different sensory modalities and practices. This approach, grounded in 40 years of empirical research, is a departure from the analytic, reductive view of human experiences as information processing. The book is structured into two parts. Each author first introduces the situated cognitive approach from their respective sensory domains (vision, audition, olfaction, gustation). The second part is the collective effort to derive methodological guidelines respecting the ecological validity of experimental investigations while formulating operational answers to applied questions (such as the sensory quality of environments and product design). This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners dealing with sensory experiences and anyone who wants to understand and celebrate the cultural diversity of human productions that make life enjoyable!

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.

This book analyses intersemiotic translation, where the translator works across sign systems and cultural boundaries. Challenging Roman Jakobson’s seminal definitions, it examines how a poem may be expressed as dance, a short story as an olfactory experience, or a film as a painting. This emergent process opens up a myriad of synaesthetic possibilities for both translator and target audience to experience form and sense beyond the limitations of words. The editors draw together theoretical and creative contributions from translators, artists, performers, academics and curators who have explored intersemiotic translation in their practice. The contributions offer a practitioner’s perspective on this rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field which spans semiotics, cognitive poetics, psychoanalysis and transformative learning theory. The book underlines the intermedial and multimodal nature of perception and expression, where semiotic boundaries are considered fluid and heuristic rather than ontological. It will be of particular interest to practitioners, scholars and students of modern foreign languages, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, interdisciplinary humanities, visual arts, theatre and the performing arts.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies. The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas: • Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar; • Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others; • Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography; • New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies. The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

This highly interdisciplinary project presents new results and the state of the art of knowledge in the psychology and neurophysiology of language, reading and dyslexia. It concentrates on basic cognitive functions of understanding and producing language and disorders within its spoken and written execution. The book grew out of the Basic Mechanisms of Language and Language Disorders conference (Leipzig, Sept. 1999).