32.3678, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Typology: Jędrzejowski, Staniewski (2021)

Tue Nov 23 02:50:50 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3678. Mon Nov 22 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3678, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Typology: Jędrzejowski, Staniewski (2021)

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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2021 21:50:23
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: The Linguistics of Olfaction

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1707.html

EDITOR: Łukasz  Jędrzejowski
EDITOR: Przemysław  Staniewski
TITLE: The Linguistics of Olfaction
SUBTITLE: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity
SERIES TITLE: Typological Studies in Language 131
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson, University of Victoria

SUMMARY

The 131st installment in Benjamins’ far-ranging “Typological Studies in
Language (TSL)” series brings together investigations of a still
under-researched domain of language use, that of how the sense of smell is
expressed and how this varies among the world’s languages. This volume
effectively establishes the point of reference from which further
crosslinguistic work will proceed, showing a number of tendencies and
dimensions of variation that have been identified so far. 

The editors’ opening chapter, “Rendering What the Nose Perceives: An
Introduction” (1-34) presents, as is typical for such collections, a précis
of the state of the art in this area of study. As this subject will be
unfamiliar to the large majority of linguists, I will describe this sketch in
more detail than I will accord to the remaining chapters. Here it is noted
that olfaction research is increasing in a number of fields, such as zoology
and neuroscience, so the recent burst of linguistic work on it is situated
within a larger intellectual trend; in each field significant new findings are
emerging. While human brains can distinguish a trillion smells, individual
languages’ repertoires of basic olfactory terms only seem to get as large as a
dozen or two. Some of that range of variation has been theorized to correlate
with what may be characterized as an industrial vs. pre-industrial split among
cultures; further research needs to be done into how unique each culture’s
linguistic construction of smell is. Many languages have a distinct
(sub-)class of “ophresaesthemes”, i.e. odor-words that show unique
morphosyntax. A hierarchy has been proposed in which certain of the sensory
faculties are crosslinguistically more likely to lexicalize than others, with
sight the most frequent, followed by hearing and then touch, and with last
place shared by smell and taste; further research is needed to verify this,
and to investigate to what extent it applies to metaphorical extensions.
Various languages, even closely related ones, are differently permissive of
extended uses of sensory expressions, e.g. of ‘see’ as ‘understand’. Some
languages show sensitivity to the animacy hierarchy in the use of such
metaphors. Not all smelling verbs develop non-literal senses in every
language; in many cases the predicate type (experience, activity, or stative)
influences this outcome. Contrary to previous speculation that olfaction
interacts little with grammar, in a number of languages it has already become
clear that morphology plays crucial roles in the expression of this sense
modality, be it in the form of dedicated classifiers, special uses of
reduplication, exploitation of case distinctions, et al. However, olfaction
does not seem to interact much with evidentiality. The diachrony of smell
terms, to the extent that research has yet been done, indicates a universal
tendency of pejoration, as well as of development from words for
air/wind/breath, smoke, etc.

Chapter 2, “Why is Smell Special? A Case Study of a European Language:
Swedish” by Åke Viberg (35-72), notes that while this language’s olfactory
lexicon is small, a detailed corpus analysis reveals several illuminating
findings. Smells, for example, are conceptualized differently in Swedish (as
sensations, carrying hedonic overtones; also as characteristics of entire
situations) than are colors (which are spoken of as objective properties of
things). 

Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano contributes Chapter 3, “The Domain of Olfaction in
Basque” (73-111) shows that copulative perception constructions correlate in
this language with characteristics and emotion, standing in contrast with
active and experiencer odor perception, which align with intellectual
processes such as thinking and seeking. It is shown that the great majority of
smell words in Basque are infrequent in present-day discourse. 

In Chapter 4, “On Olfactory Terminology in Georgian and Other Kartvelian
Languages” (113-135), Manana Kobaidze, Revaz Tchantouria and Karina Vamling
primarily focuses on Standard Georgian and Megrelian in a more diachronic
light, showing a certain propensity for metaphoric extension across sensory
modalities. Verbs denoting olfaction can, if already carrying negative
connotations, acquire metaphoric extensions. 

The fifth chapter, written by Kate Bellamy, is “Let Me Count the Ways It
Stinks: A Typology of Olfactory Terms in Purepecha (Mexico)” (137-173)
presents a language which uses morphology that is specific to olfaction, a
rarity; 15 abstract smell terms (ones that are phonologically and semantically
distinct from the nouns for their referents) have been identified so far.
These are compared with lexicon from the modality of tasting. Diachronic
variability is found depending on the elicitation strategy used with speakers,
but the structure of this lexical field has remained fairly stable for
centuries. 

Chapter 6 is “Olfactory, Gustatory and Tactile Perception in Beja
(North-Cushitic)” by Martine Vanhove and Mohamed-Tahir Hamid Ahmed (175-198)
compares the lexicon of all three “lower senses”, olfactory, gustatory, and
tactile. Smell has the most varied (largest) lexicon of these, with a
preference for verbs, yet it produces the least number of metaphors, far
overshadowed by expressions based on tasting. Source-oriented constructions,
e.g. ‘to emit a pleasant odor’, prevail except in the domain of touch. 

>From Renée Lambert-Brétière we have Chapter 7 on “How to Smell without a
Verb ‘to smell’ in Fon” (199-220). In this Kwa language of Benin, the lexicon
of olfaction is overall rather slight, necessitating a variety of strategies
for expressing this modality. Smells are put as issuing from a source, by the
use of various verbs such as ‘emit’, ‘reject’, and ‘detach’, each having
certain hedonic overtones. Perception of odors is expressed by the use of a
modality-neutral verb of perception. Not only are odors conceived as
reflecting their human sources’ character, but also certain prominent emotions
such as love are conventionalized as predicates of smelling. 

In Chapter 8, Anthony Backhouse examines “How to Talk about Smell in Japanese”
(221-249). He focuses on the vernacular speech register, noting that its core
olfactory lexicon consists just of two verbs, with a third being less frequent
and more literary. There is also a basic adjective ‘smelly’, for unpleasant
odors. This tiny inventory is richly exploited by speakers by means including
deverbal nominalization, adjectival and nominal modification, and
conventionalized collocations, e.g. with verbs ‘float’ or ‘pervade’. Smell
“mimetics” (ideophones/onomatopoeia) are based on two distinct shapes,
respectively connoting strong enveloping smells and sharp ones. Literary smell
vocabulary is briefly surveyed, showing some additional phenomena such as
bound roots and a “suffixoid”, due to the syntax of the Sino-Japanese stratum.

This is followed by Chapter 9, from Amy Pei-jung Lee, “An Overview of
Olfactory Expressions in Formosan Languages” (251-276). Here we find a great
diversity among these related languages, which represent all twelve branches
of Austronesian (eleven being endemic to Taiwan). Some languages such as Amis
boast a large olfactory lexicon, whereas at least one, Tsou, lacks such a
dedicated vocabulary entirely. Many of these languages share a general
phonemic template for smell terms with other Austronesian languages. They
typically have a dedicated odorant-oriented morphological structure involving
a prefix or proclitic plus a reduplication. Dimensions of ±human, ±polite, and
±visible are exploited to generate a range of specific references and
connotations. 

Chapter 10 is devoted to “Olfactory Words in Northern Vanuatu: Langue vs.
parole” by Alexandre François (277-304). This chapter takes on the common
hypothesis that tropical environments will correlate with an abundance of
olfactory lexicon, disproving its universality. In a creative elaboration on
this thinking, however, the author shows evidence that speakers’ quotidian
speech behavior (langue/performance) involves a vastly smaller smell
vocabulary than what they produce in focused elicitation tests of their
parole/latent competence. Cultural associations of smell are touched on,
showing strong associations with the natural environment and with the basic
contrast life/death. 

Bar Avineri contributes Chapter 11, “Alternating ‘smell’ in Modern Hebrew”
(305-342) investigates the varied codings of smell experiencers and, uniquely
in this volume, the types of complement clauses that accompany smelling
expressions. The alternations thus discovered with the experiencer olfaction
verb parallel those occurring with experiencer verbs of other sensory
modalities. The historical development of the Hebrew olfaction lexicon is
outlined, showing the modern influence of Yiddish. 

Chapter 12 brings Virginia Hill’s “Syntactic Patterns for Romanian Olfactive
Verbs” (343-368), where a major focus is on the two readings typical for a
smelling-verb in this language: that of physical perception and that of
cognitive inference. To justify a single lexical entry covering both readings
in a predictable way, the author proposes a Chomskyan Minimalism-style
“uninterpretable [evid] formal feature” (361).

Next is Chapter 13, “Smelling over Time: The Lexicon of Olfaction from Latin
to Italian” (369-403), which is the most diachronically-oriented of the
volume’s chapters. A key research question is whether the putative
“deodorization” typical of modern Western culture correlates with a decrease
in the olfactory lexicon from ancestor- to daughter-language. No such
shrinkage is found, but Italian is shown to have become more oriented toward
negative hedonic evaluation of odors than Latin was. Considerations of
tabooing of concepts considered bad, and of a universal tendency favoring
pejoration over melioration, are invoked as possible explanatory factors. 

Chapter 14, from Przemysław Staniewski and Adam Golębiowski, asks “To What
Extent Can Source-Based Olfactory Verbs be Classified as Copulas? The Case of
German and Polish” (403-447), an interesting extension of the already rich
literature on copulas. The authors show that olfactory verbs do not always
denote physical smelling. When the smell serves as the “basis for inferences
and judgements” (441), it is copular in that it establishes an identifying
link between the subject and predicate. But all other uses (those of “direct
olfactory sensations”, loc. cit.) therefore are non-copular. 

The final contribution is Magdalena Zawisławska and Marta Falkowska’s
“Typology of Metaphors with the Olfactory Target Domain in the Polish
Perfumery Discourse” (449-474). This chapter employs Cognitive Metaphor Theory
(CMT) and Fillmorean Frame Semantics to formalize and compare these
structures. An unexpected finding is that three “atypical” metaphor types are
in fact quite frequent in the genre under study. These are metaphors diverging
from the typical “X is Y” formula: “mixed metaphors” containing multiple
source frames (e.g. TASTE and SPACE); “entangled” ones (similar to this, but
further involving clashing semantic and syntactic structures); and “narrative”
ones which are elaborated through a protracted stretch of discourse.  

The front matter includes a Table of Contents ([v]-vi), Preface and
Acknowledgments ([vii]), and List of Contributors ([ix]-xiii). End matter
encompasses a Languages Index ([475]-476) and a Subjects Index ([477]-481). 

EVALUATION

This volume of studies is an extremely welcome contribution to an area of
study that, because it is still in its infancy, is very unfamiliar to most
linguists. There is by now a tradition of typologically-oriented collections
gathering studies of a range of unrelated languages viewed through the lens of
a particular structural dimension, into which the present book fits fairly
seamlessly. The heterogeneity of approaches taken here, encompassing the
synchronic and the historical across various registers, and a number of
theories, adds up to a very fine demonstration of the ways allied scholars can
take on a new area of study. Some of the most compelling findings here tend to
be those that were evidently unanticipated by the researcher—not that we have
much idea yet what to expect in terms of typological regularities in the
linguistic domain of olfaction—as with the northern Vanuatu discovery that the
relevant lexicon in daily use is dwarfed by what speakers produce under
elicitation. Such findings are at least as sure to stimulate further research
as are the editors’ (and some contributors’) assiduous notes on areas needing
more investigation. The latter include questions about what kinds of interplay
exist between evidentiality and olfactory expressions (18-19), and which kinds
of smelling-verbs give rise to non-literal meanings in various languages (12).

Typically for so many anthologies of articles, certain potentially helpful
features are absent here, such as a table of symbols used (although each
chapter does reliably tabulate its own set of abbreviations). More keenly felt
is the lack of a volume-encompassing Index of Authors Cited, since several key
figures in this nascent subdiscipline are referenced in a number of the
contributions (again each chapter has a separate References section). 

The editors’ introductory chapter makes use of much the same terminology as
the remaining chapters do (e.g. ‘source’ (2)), and that degree of unity is to
be praised as a somewhat rare accomplishment, but it probably would be
beneficial to add a highlighted set of definitions for those terms, and to
fully unify them across the contributions (where e.g. ‘source’ varies with
‘sensory’ and ‘copula’). Definitions should also be added for the rarer words
such as ‘ophresaesthemes’ (5), which I was unable to locate in any dictionary.

To some extent the heterogeneity of theoretical stances in this collection
might impede crosslinguistic comparison, inasmuch as it deviates from a
descriptive goal. Thus the close co-occurrence in Chapter 7 of the Universal
Grammar term ‘strict adjacency’ (204) with the traditional English grammar
concept of ‘semi-auxiliary’ is somewhat jarring, and it is unclear to me to
what extent Chapter 12’s Minimalist Program jargon is explained for the
uninitiated, and therefore whether or not it advances typological
understanding as much as it might if it were phrased in less-specialized
terms. 

The Subjects index is really exhaustive for the concepts that it includes; for
example, given the relevance of hedonic evaluations to olfaction, it is
notable and useful that ‘pleasant’ has by my count 48 page references. Really
interesting comparisons and contrasts among the sensory modalities occur in
many of the studies, making for example the four page references under
‘synaesthesia’ (plus one for ‘synesthetic metaphor’ and two for ‘weak
synesthetic metaphor’) a most welcome springboard for further generalizations.
And yet, relevant to this same theme, ‘hierarchy’ lacks indexing (viz. the
discussion on 331 of which modalities are the most likely to be lexicalized,
and a similar ordering on 195). To continue this idea, another way in which
the editorial hand could leave a positive mark might have been if the various
tables in several studies, showing that e.g. vision is indeed more fully
lexicalized than smell in a number of languages, had been “tagged” with the
word ‘hierarchy’. 

One fact that emerges from reading this set of studies, but that is not
highlighted in the introductory summation, is that a given language may
lexicalize olfaction in multiple syntactic classes; e.g. in my native English,
we have basic smell lexemes that are adjectival, verbal, nominal, and even
interjections (‘pew!’). Several of the chapters seem to default to an implicit
view that a given class typifies all of a language’s odor repertoire, e.g.
Table 1 of verbs in Germanic (3). Possibly this is a byproduct of a
privileging of verbs and predicates as interesting objects of study, over the
other word classes that obviously account for a significant proportion of
human speech behavior. 

This book can be recommended for those researching the many domains in which
typological generalizations are being discovered, providing as it does
numerous references to work on other sense modalities. Its overall theoretical
agnosticism, and the sheer lack of barriers to entry in such a novel area of
study, make it well approachable for those at the student level, such that it
could provide some of the readings for a seminar on cultural or
psycholinguistics, typology, and so forth. In fact its many pointers to needed
further research might inspire many honors- and graduate-level research
projects.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Douglas Robertson, PhD, is a consulting linguist who specializes in
Pacific Northwest (of North America) Indigenous language history and
documentation. His work focally involves the pidgin-creole Chinuk Wawa
(Chinook Jargon) and its lexifiers Natítanui (Shoalwater-Clatsop Lower
Chinookan) and ɬəw'ál'məš (Lower Chehalis Salish).

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