31.1528, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics: Winter (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1528. Tue May 05 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1528, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics: Winter (2019)

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Date: Tue, 05 May 2020 22:04:20
From: Joyce Cheung [joyce.cheung at ln.edu.hk]
Subject: Sensory Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2325.html

AUTHOR: Bodo  Winter
TITLE: Sensory Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Language, perception and metaphor
SERIES TITLE: Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 20
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Joyce Oiwun Cheung, Lingnan University

SUMMARY

Bodo Winter’s Sensory Linguistics: Language, Perception and Metaphor, which
was based on his PhD thesis, attempts to bridge the research gap between human
perception and the language used to convey these perceptual experiences.
Though substantial studies have been done in neuroscience in terms of
calibrating human’s perceptual-cognitive correlation, the author sets out to
propose and test a new hypothesis, by scrutinising patterns and frequency of
sensory words and the occurrences of such words in corpora of naturally
occurring data; he claims that ‘language mirrors perception’. Word lists and
participant ratings from previous studies (e.g. Lynott and Connell, 2009;
2013) are adopted to run through a variety of statistical analyses to justify
the hypothesis, as well as to support or debunk some myths in the five senses
folk model (i.e. sight, sound, smell, taste and touch), the hierarchy of these
senses (e.g. Ullmann 1945; Williams, 1976), ineffability (i.e. the difficulty
or impossibility of expressing some perceptual experiences), and metaphors
(e.g. whether some sensory words are actually sources ‘loaned’ to describe
experience in another realm of sense). This book would be particularly useful
to students and researchers who are interested in psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, corpus linguistics, lexicosemantics and any
interdisciplinary studies under the umbrella of cognitive studies. Starting
with an introduction to the theories concerned and then following up with
different case studies, the book is designed as a textbook to inform readers
of existing literature and theoretical grounds before playing with statistics.
It would be a nice read for audiences who have basic knowledge of statistical
methods or corpus linguistics, as the book does not involve extensive
calculation but only occasional comparative graph reading. 

The first chapter gives an overall introduction to the whole book, defining
sensory linguistics to be ‘studies of the way language is related to senses’
and forecasting what is to be expected in the rest of the book. The rest of
the monograph is divided into two major parts – theory and case studies with
each chapter detailing the key issues and providing comparative studies with
extant literature, data sets or examples, arguments and limitations, as well
as conclusions. 

Part I begins with the second chapter which introduces the five senses folk
model, by discussing the potential danger of neglecting finer-grained
distinctions and defending the adoption of the five senses model throughout
the rest of the book. Chapter Three deals with a box of semiotic tools in
which words (or a basic sign unit conveying a meaning) are invented, including
‘icons’ that resemble part of the perceptual experience (e.g. ‘kiwi’ which
mimics the sound emitted by the kiwi birds), ‘indices’ which often refer to
the sources of meanings (e.g. the colour term ‘orange’ is taken from its
origin, the ‘orange’ fruit), ‘symbols’  which are arbitrarily assigned to
represent a meaning, ‘technical language’ which stems from the scientific
system (e.g. hours and minutes), and ‘metaphors’ which borrow signs from the
source to the target domain. Chapter Four provides possible accounts of
ineffability. For example: 1) some senses are more perceptual and effable in
the first place, 2) some ‘common sensibles’ involve several senses, 3)
subjective experiences are idiosyncratic, or 4) simply that certain perceptual
experiences outnumber linguistic labels allowed in human languages. Chapter
Five puts forward the central idea – Embodied Lexicon Hypothesis - which
proposes that perception influences language, in terms of ‘asymmetries’ (i.e.
one sense dominates the perception and/or language), ‘associations’ (i.e. one
sense is particularly close to another, and such proximity is mirrored in
language), and ‘activations’ (i.e. the sensory-motor process is also reflected
in language use). Chapter Six first brings up the concepts of ‘synesthesia’
(i.e. one perceptual sense involuntarily triggers/associates another sense at
the same time) and ‘transfers in synesthetic metaphors’ (i.e. borrowing
expression in one sense to represent perception in another), and then
differentiates the two concepts i.e. that ‘synesthetic metaphors’ are not
synesthetic at all. Additionally, Chapter Seven carries on to suggest that
‘synesthetic metaphors’ are not metaphorical either, by first recapping the
concepts of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and then asserting that ‘synesthetic
metaphors’, despite their title, are often either ‘supramodal’ (i.e. some
neural areas highly associated with each other) or multisensory in nature, 
devoid of intersensory transfer. Following the traditional senses folk model,
Chapter Eight continues by introducing the hierarchies proposed by scholars
like Ullmann (1945) and Williams (1976) to organise the five or more senses
based on intersensory asymmetries; Chapter Nine attempts to explain the
hierarchies from a global (i.e. an overarching principle dictating the whole
hierarchy) and local (i.e. accounting for asymmetry between different pairs of
senses) perspective. After going through possible implications, the author
determines that sensory vocabulary, emotion and iconicity are the key factors
pertaining to explaining hierarchies. 

Part II Case Studies are structured as follows: Chapter Ten lays a foundation
for the methodologies used in the existing literature, to try out different
approaches, to account for multiple facts, and to make the research design
reproducible for other researchers. This chapter also emphasises the
research-method ‘norm’ which invites participants to rate sensory words prior
to any interpretation. This method is further explained in Chapter Eleven,
where the ratings of the five senses of each words are weighted. It guides
readers in calculating the exclusivity of a word belonging to a particular
sense, and assessing the cosine similarity of a sensory word’s ratings in the
two datasets. Chapter Twelve uses this normalising technique to gauge the
distribution of words in each sense, as well as how much a sense’s exclusivity
(i.e. the degree to which a word solely used for that sense) deviated from the
average baseline. Chapter Thirteen compares these two components each time to
arrive at intersensory correlation and experiments with cluster analysis to
invent twelve new categories. Chapter Fourteen further investigates the
correlation between adjective and noun pairs, by finding the overall cosine
similarity and cross correlating different pairs of sense adjectives and sense
nouns (e.g. sight adjective + touch noun). Chapter Fifteen adopts three models
to compare the sensory word frequency, varieties of dictionary meanings and
iconicity. Chapter Sixteen evaluates the absolute valence (i.e. being either
very positive or negative) of sensory words and their contextual words.
Penultimately, Chapter Seventeen cross tabulates sensory aspects with each
other to update the sensory hierarchy, in which the author believes no single
paradigm shall rule over (and account for) all sensory hierarchy, but the
asymmetries depend on the lexicons, emotional valence and iconicity. The last
chapter serves as a conclusion.

EVALUATION

The book refers to extensive literature in sensory language, neuropsychology
and metaphor studies; for example, in Chapter Five, reviewing extensive
perceptual simulation studies, the author aims to relate the comprehensive
findings to linguistic phenomena, and in Chapter Nine the author makes strong
reference to neuropsychological studies and notes that it would be hard and
ineffective to attempt to  rank senses in a clear cut way. Adapted from
previous literature, the traditional five senses folk model and monolithic
hierarchy were initially referred to (but are later questioned as
oversimplified) as a bridging gap between previous studies and Winter’s new
approach. However, since existing research has long adopted the five senses
folk model, following this tradition renders research findings comparable. The
overall structure is well designed to brief readers about potential domains to
consider in sensory linguistics, to propose the author’s hypothesis and his
disagreement on a universal sensory hierarchy, and finally to support his
claims with vast statistical analyses on the perceptual strength ratings
incorporated in corpus data. Every chapter starts with a succinct introduction
of concepts and literature, and concludes with a concise conclusion. For
example, at the end of Chapter Thirteen, the author gives a clear summary
about the necessity to draw more than five distinctions when viewing the
microstructure, and fewer than five when viewing the macrostructure. In
addition, the author provides detailed explanations alongside neuroscientific
jargon, such as ‘amygdala’. The author also thoughtfully remarks on the
etymology of certain technical terms, e.g. ‘common sensibles’ (Chapter 4.3.2).
By tabulating the differences between canonical synaesthesia and synesthetic
metaphors in a table format, the author also helps readers grasp the key
differences collectively. 

Contrary to the title, the book is not ‘metaphorical,’ as the book centrally
discusses relations between senses as revealed in language. Although the
Conceptual Metaphor Theory is well introduced in the book, the author himself
makes it clear that synesthetic metaphors are not metaphorical. The title
itself might disappoint readers who are only interested in primary, typical
and embodied metaphors. Minor presentation issues are noticeable: in Chapter
Three, only the phonological iconicity is exemplified in section 3.2,
'depicting sensory perceptions with icons’. As a result, readers might be
misled to think that iconicity is exclusive to sound. In Chapter Five, the
addition of ‘emotion meaning’ in the final section should be a key factor in
sensory word analysis; therefore, I would suggest visualising the framework
with a triangulation diagram in which three points are captioned with
perceptual processing, linguistic system and emotional meaning respectively.
Chapter Twelve and Thirteen are statistically dense. Chapter Twelve is a bit
difficult to follow though the guidelines and explanations are useful.
However, Chapter Thirteen jumps straight in the tables and charts with little
reminder of what the data and components represent. For example, in Table 7,
readers are clueless about what C1 & C2 represent. Moreover, data such as +0.3
in Table 7 is not properly introduced. Readers would be puzzled as to how the
figures were computed. Likewise, Figure 7 should be explained in greater
detail. Additionally, in Chapter Fifteen, the difference between categorical
and continuous models is not conspicuous. It would be logical to refer each
model to their respective chapter origin. The book should attend to the choice
of words as well. In Chapter Three, when stating the fact that ‘iconicity’
varies across modality of expression, ‘speaking versus signing’ would be
better phrased as ‘verbal versus signing’ since readers, without having read
the remaining chapters, would take ‘speaking’ as ‘speech’ rather than an
umbrella term for ‘spoken and written words’. On p.115 while discussing the
reasons for sense asymmetry, in the line ‘using metaphors in poetry’, readers
would be disconcerted by the sudden disjointed mention of metaphors (not even
synesthetic metaphor). In Chapter Fourteen, although only adjective-noun pairs
are studied, the author makes a broad claim on p. 179 that ‘sensory words tend
to combine with words that have similar perceptual characteristics’ which may
not be the case in noun-verb and other types of pairs. The research design is
neither unproblematic. For example, in Chapter Two, perceptual ratings are
collected from British native speakers, which unfortunately neglects the
variations of world Englishes today. As the author makes it clear that the
model is culturally specific, the model could be unusable for non-British
English or even other languages. This is exemplified in Chapter Three when the
author notes that different languages have different ideas of what aspect
should be selected to be represented iconically. 

Furthermore, there are still many ambiguities left unaddressed by the end of
the book: while talking about ‘arbitrary signs’ on p.17, the author mentions
‘arbitrary symbols’ on p.36. It is confusing whether the author referred to
signs or symbols, primarily because de Saussure (1959) was cited as making
explicit distinctions between the two. The author recognises these two terms
as distinct from each other and should not have used them interchangeably. In
Chapter Eleven, since the author offers verbal instruction instead of
clear-cut equations for the exclusivity on p.143, I attempted to calculate the
exclusivity but the number did not match (e.g. I got 92.5% for 95.1%, and
11.5% instead of 11.6%). If round up or variance is employed, readers should
be informed. Likewise, simple equations such as ratio = total source count /
total target count (in Chapter Seventeen) should be provided. Also, it is
unclear whether participants in Lynott and Connell’s (2009, 2013) experiments
were given options to pass on words about which they were uncertain. As
pointed out by the author himself on p.157, participants might simply be
guessing if they did not know the words well and thus this is not an accurate
reflection of their choices. Besides, the degree of certainty may be a factor
influencing the overall perceptual strength of each sense of each word. Were
certainties calibrated and weighted beforehand? Regarding the categorical
modality classification on p.155, what is the threshold of categorising each
word into a sense, given that many words are not exclusive, especially if the
maximal perceptual strength rating on one sense is almost negligibly above the
others? In Chapter Fourteen, why was the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA) used instead of the British National Corpus (BNC), given that
the raters in Lynott and Connell (2009; 2013) were all British? How are
dictionary meanings counted in Chapter Fifteen? Do the 12 clusters work well
for the 13,915 English lemmas in Chapter Sixteen as well, given that the
clusters were generated from only 423 adjectives? Is new clustering necessary?
Also,given that five content words preceding and following the headword would
be considered in the average valence measure, were words positioned closer to
the headword weighted heavier? Finally, in Chapter Seventeen, the Lynott and
Connell (2013) noun modality rating was criticised for bias; if the noun list
was so biased, why didn’t the author use Strik Lievers (2015) data/findings in
all previous chapters?

The book has successfully achieved some ambitious goals: firstly, the five
senses folk model serves as a window for researchers to probe into studying
the multisensory nature of sensory words; secondly, the case studies such as
the intersensory correlation and semantic preference support the hypothesis
that perceptual associations and asymmetries relate to the corresponding
linguistic association and asymmetries, (though I cannot see the ‘result in’
causal relation promised); and thirdly, the local accounts of different
asymmetries under different circumstances have provided challenges to the one
hierarchy since a single principle can no longer account for the subtle
differences observed between senses.

Lastly, the book demonstrated appreciable contributions to the field.
Reproducibility is highlighted as the author recognises the significance to
share raw data for open access by which different researchers can make use of
and support/challenge the claims and design. As sensory language research
often relies on linguistic intuition, the author brought in merits from corpus
linguistics as a counterintuitive approach. It is also an excellent move to
combine the strength of human ratings with corpus data, contextual corpus and
non-contextual corpus. As corpus linguistics often yields scattered patterns
of language use which linguists find hard to generalise,  and human rating
alone is prone to be subjective, using human ratings as an anchor to narrow
down and study how different aspects of (multi)sensory words perform in
corpora of natural linguistic data would be hugely beneficial. Several future
directions are suggested by the author, such as looking at ratings in other
word classes (e.g. verbs), sensory language of deaf and blind people, or
looking at which explanatory factor matters the most for the sense hierarchy.
These suggestions, as a result of a well-informed, and mostly well-argued
paper, would be worth pursuing and make it possible for various students in
order to build on this research. 

REFERENCES

Lynott, Demot & Louise Connell. 2009. Modality exclusivity norms for 423
object properties. Behavior Research Methods 41. 558-564.

Lynott, Demot & Louise Connell. 2013. Modality exclusivity norms for 400
nouns: The relationship between perceptual experiences and surface word form.
Behavior Research Methods 45. 516-526.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. Course in general linguistics. New York, NY: The
Philosophy Library.

Strik Lievers, Francesca. 2015. Synaesthesia: A corpus-based study of
cross-modal directionality. Functions of Language 22(1). 69-95.

Ullmann, Stephen. 1959. The principles of semantics. Glasgow: Jackson, Son &
Co.

Williams, Joseph M. 1976. Synesthetic adjectives: A possible law of semantic
change. Language 52. 461-478.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a research fellow at the School of Graduate Studies at Lingnan
University. I hold an MA in English Language Studies and BSSc in
Communication. My research vision sees the need to contrastively study what
cross-modal and cross-linguistic big data can inform us. By comparing the
patterns driven from corpora of various modes (e.g. text, visuals, gestures,
sound) or testing hypotheses in corpora of different languages, we can exploit
the systematicity of scrutinising the naturally-occurring data to make a
better sense of the world. In other words, I am mostly interested in corpus
linguistics, multimodality and discourse analysis. My publications can be
found on Social Semiotics and ReCALL.





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