27.4128, Calls: Cog Sci, Gen Ling, Semantics/Switzerland

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4128. Fri Oct 14 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4128, Calls: Cog Sci, Gen Ling, Semantics/Switzerland

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Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:53:02
From: Francesca Strik Lievers [francesca.striklievers at fileli.unipi.it]
Subject: Sensory Words: Language and Perception

 
Full Title: Sensory Words: Language and Perception 

Date: 10-Sep-2017 - 13-Sep-2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Francesca Strik Lievers
Meeting Email: francesca.striklievers at fileli.unipi.it

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; General Linguistics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

Humans perceive the world through their senses. At the same time, humans talk
to each other about what they perceive and how they perceive it. One of the
primary things we do with language is to talk about sensory impressions, such
as whether a curry tastes too spicy or whether a fish smells rotten. This
workshop is about the intersection of the senses and language. What linguistic
strategies are available to language users to encode sensory perceptions? How
do these strategies differ across languages, cultures, time, and text types?
And how, ultimately, does the linguistic expression of sensory experience link
to cognition and to the brain structures and processes that are involved in
perception?

Within this larger picture, the workshop aims to focus on differences between
sensory modalities, both as concerns their linguistic expression and their
linguistic processing.

It has been shown that some senses are more difficult than others to express
through verbal means. For instance, smell has been dubbed a “muted sense”
(Oloffson & Gottfried, 2014) because of the relatively limited number of smell
terms in Indo-European languages. However, cross-linguistic studies reveal
that some languages have considerably larger smell vocabularies (Majid &
Burenhult, 2014). Moreover, the question as to the differential “ineffability”
of the senses (Levinson & Majid, 2014) needs to be treated relatively with
respect to the particular linguistic encoding strategy in question. For
example, smells can also be described using synaesthetic metaphors (Williams,
1976; Yu, 2003), e.g., borrowing taste-related vocabulary as in “sweet
fragrance”. Similarly, auditory concepts could be seen as relatively ineffable
as well, once one takes into account that most words for such concepts are
imitative (e.g., “squealing”, “beeping”) and not symbolic-descriptive as, for
example, corresponding visual words (e.g, “purple”, “green”).

These questions need to be considered with respect to what is known about the
underlying cognitive and perceptual processes, including the processing of
sensory words. Experiments suggest that processing sensory words such as
“fragrant”, “smooth” and “blue” involve the recruitment of the brain areas
that are involved in actually perceiving the corresponding percepts (Pecher,
Zeelenberg & Barsalou, 2003; González et al., 2006). While at present there is
a large consent on the fact that processing sensory language involves the
mental simulation of perceptual content to some degree, it is not clear what
this entails for generalizations about the structure of sensory language. In
particular, tying in with the differential ineffability issue, what does it
say about the connection between language and perception that certain sensory
perceptions are less likely to be encoded in descriptive terminology? And what
does it say about the underlying perceptual modalities that some senses are
more likely expressed using particular semiotic means, e.g., the fact that
auditory concepts are more likely to be expressed sound-symbolically, and the
fact that sound concepts are frequently described using touch terminology, as
in “rough sound”, “smooth sound” and “harsh sound”? 

The workshop aims to explore these issues bringing together linguists,
anthropologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists working on sensory
language. 

Conveners: 

Francesca Strik Lievers (University of Pisa)
Bodo Winter (University of Birmingham)


Call for Papers:

We invite submissions of abstracts of 300 words (excluding references), which
should be sent to Francesca Strik Lievers
(francesca.striklievers at unipi.fileli.it) and Bodo Winter (bodo at bodowinter.com)
by 1 November 2016. Contact details (name, affiliation, email address) should
be included in the body of the email. 

We welcome contributions exploring the intersections between language and the
senses, on topics including (but not limited to) the following:

- The lexicon of the senses and their differential ineffability in diverse
languages, cultures, times, and text types (e.g., Viberg 1983; Majid &
Burenhult, 2014)
- Perception metaphors and polysemy of sensory lexemes in a synchronic or
diachronic perspective (e.g., Ullmann 1959; Williams, 1976; Sweetser, 1990;
Rakova, 2003)
- Sound symbolism as a linguistic encoding strategy in the sensory domain
- Sensory language, embodied approaches to sensory language and the mental
simulation of sensory words

Important Dates:

10 November 2016: Deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts to the
workshop conveners (bodo at bodowinter.com /
francesca.striklievers at unipi.fileli.it)
25 November 2016: Notification of acceptance by the workshop conveners and
submission of the workshop proposal to SLE 
25 December 2016: Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE
15 January 2017: Deadline for submission of full abstracts (500 words,
excluding references) for review by SLE




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