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The Semantics of Taste: Linguistic Categorization of Crispy and Crunchy

Research Project
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01.08.2008
 - 01.08.2013

While we have no difficulties in communicating sensory perceptions in everyday conversation, we hardly reflect on what they actually mean. This Ph.D. project examines the language of taste expression from a cognitive linguistic perspective with the aim to highlight the range of meanings of certain taste terms. How we speak about taste on an everyday basis can differentiate strongly from how taste is measured and described in sensory science. An initial analysis is on the terms crispy and crunchy which show a strong sense of polysemy and synaesthetic usage. The aim is to semantically frame these results and to categorize them according to the meaning that is activated. The meaning of such an adjective describing taste is not fixed but derives in the discussion and may change according to its respective context. A corpus linguistic method is used to conduct the data. The material has been collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The method of corpus research further serves as a tool for an inter-linguistic (English/ German) approach which can prove useful e.g. in the field of product advertising. A further aim is to highlight such fields of application of the research, interesting from both a linguistic as well as commercial point of view. This work connects to the interdisciplinary project Sensory Language and the Semantics of Taste [1] in which sensory scientists, linguists and cognitive scientists capture and observe the German vocabulary of taste. The aim of the project is an online dictionary of taste terms which can be used for both scientific and commercial reasons. The Ph.D. observes the English language focusing on how such bodily perceptions are conceptualized and put into words. [1] http://www.sensorysemantics.ch/

Members (1)

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Catherine Diederich

Principal Investigator