36.3250, Reviews: Linguistic Synesthesia: Bodo Winter and Francesca Strik-Lievers (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3250. Fri Oct 24 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3250, Reviews: Linguistic Synesthesia: Bodo Winter and Francesca Strik-Lievers (2025)

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Date: 24-Oct-2025
From: David Carrasco Coquillat [davidcarrascoquillat at gmail.com]
Subject: Bodo Winter and Francesca Strik-Lievers (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2511

Title: Linguistic Synesthesia
Subtitle: A Meta-analysis
Series Title: Elements in Cognitive Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/cognitive-linguistics/linguistic-synesthesia-meta-analysis?format=PB&isbn=9781009519144

Author(s): Bodo Winter and Francesca Strik-Lievers

Reviewer: David Carrasco Coquillat

SUMMARY
Researchers Bodo Winter and Francesca Strik-Lievers have added another
volume to the Cambridge UP series, Elements in Cognitive Linguistics.
This Element is a comprehensive, accurate and updated inquiry into the
study of linguistic synesthesia. The phenomenon of linguistic
synesthesia consists of the combination of expressions associated with
different senses, which creates a conflict between modalities whose
uneven distribution in the data is well worth studying. To do so,
Winter & Strik-Lievers question the traditional hierarchy of the
senses that permeates the literature, whereby sight and sound would be
privileged over the presumably lower senses of touch, taste and smell.
When examining that long-established distinction between the lower and
the higher senses, which has commonly been mapped into the linear
representation of touch > taste > smell > sight/sound, the researchers
shift from a top-down approach to the data to a bottom-up study that
avoids making assumptions about the existence of a hierarchy of the
senses before properly scrutinizing the data. Therefore, Winter &
Strik-Lievers discuss a meta-analytic dataset consisting of 14
languages from seven different language families, in what they refer
to as the largest cross-linguistic analysis of linguistic synesthesia
that has been published so far.
The booklet is organized into 10 sections, which predominantly follow
the conventional organization of academic papers. Sections 1 & 2
provide an introduction to the subject matter, as the researchers
define the concept of linguistic synesthesia and trace the study of
the phenomenon back to Stephen Ullmann (1959), the Hungarian linguist
who established preliminary typological generalizations about
synesthesia, such as the fact that intersensory transfers tend to move
from “lower” to “higher” modalities, with touch standing out as the
most common source modality and sound as the most common target
modality. In this sense, the phrase “smooth melody” is studied as a
prototypical case under a metaphorical analysis, where the noun
related to sound is the target of the intersensory transfer which is
accessed through a source (smooth) that is typically used to speak
about touch. Researchers justify their decision of carrying out a
meta-analysis combining datasets from different languages on the
grounds of moving research closer to linguistic typology and claims
about language universals, through a research work that focuses on
observational rather than experimental studies, given the fact that
these observational studies account for the majority of the research
published in the field, and serve as a starting point for experimental
research on linguistic synesthesia.
Section 3 offers valuable theoretical considerations into the
linguistic study of the sensory experience, as well as context about
the hierarchy of the senses and the evolution of research on
linguistic synesthesia. A relevant feature of this evolution is the
move in focus from literary texts to general language use
(Strik-Lievers, 2015), enabled by the recent availability of large
reference corpora in a variety of languages. Winter & Strik-Lievers
use this section to justify their decision to rely on the five senses
folk model inherited from Aristotle that classifies senses into sight,
sound, touch, taste and smell, thus not separating touch from
temperature, as researchers like Ronga et al. (2012) had previously
done. Winter & Strik-Lievers also advocate for a theoretical shift
from unidirectionality towards asymmetry, as they show that
metaphorical transfers in one direction (A→B) in an exceptionless
manner, with no accounts of the reverse mapping (B→A) attested in a
corpus, are merely an issue of data size. Instead, biased
bidirectional connections, where A→B is more common than A→B, are
treated as a core element in metaphorical analysis and the study of
linguistic synesthesia.
In Section 4, the researchers dig into the methods used for their
study, including an explanation of the resources included, which come
from corpus data and dictionary data and combine different genres
(general language and literary) in addition to the 14 different
languages. Winter & Strik-Lievers address possible methodological
shortcomings too; for example, they highlight the limitations of a
meta-analysis which features only seven language families in total,
and where 63% of the datasets are Indo-European. The rationale of the
meta-analysis also explains the choice of Bayesian inference over null
hypothesis significance testing, given the interest in making claims
about hypotheses, which leads to an approach that allows for this in a
consistent manner.
Sections 5–8 present the results of the meta-analysis. Important
findings of the study include the assessment that linguistic
synesthesia is about asymmetry and not unidirectionality,
contradicting Zhao et al.’s (2019) division of linguistic synesthesia
into unidirectional and biased-directional (i.e. asymmetric).
Additionally, the results indicated that touch and taste were on
average more likely to be sources and smell and sound more likely to
be targets, while sight showed an overall symmetry in its profile
despite its slight target preference. Other remarkable results include
the finding that touch was more likely to be a source than a target in
all datasets without exception, while sound was a dominant target in
every dataset without exception. At the same time, touch and sound
showed the most remarkable pairwise asymmetry, in as much as the
mapping touch→sound was found to be overwhelmingly more common than
sound→touch.
Winter & Strik-Lievers engage in a relevant discussion of their
results in Section 9, which highlights other important findings of
their investigation, including the higher number of
hierarchy-congruent cases over hierarchy-incongruent cases, in a
context where neither genre nor data type seemed to be particularly
relevant, and which would be evidence in favor of the hierarchy of the
senses. Nevertheless, it was revealed that a mere three of the 11
cells treated as hierarchy-congruent accounted for two-thirds of the
hierarchy congruency, suggesting that a much smaller set of mappings
can explain most of what is normally attributed to the hierarchy. In
fact, Winter & Strik-Lievers find out that, if we were to rank the
average source/target ratios to establish a hierarchy of the senses,
this would be touch > taste > sight > smell > sound. This, remarkably,
deviates from the touch > taste > smell > sight/sound ranking that has
traditionally been considered in the literature.
The conclusion, in Section 10, aims to reinforce the claim that
emphasis needs to be put on specific mappings rather than broad
generalizations about the hierarchy of the senses. Winter &
Strik-Lievers’ study suggests that patterns in the data are more
nuanced than what is generally suggested in the studies that aim to
reconfirm the hierarchy of the senses. They conclude that the
possibilities of research on linguistic synesthesia are enormous; in
order to make progress in the field, linguists need to go beyond the
limiting nature of the hierarchy.
EVALUATION
This booklet offers a brief but complete meta-analysis of a topic that
has been the object of many relevant observational and experimental
studies, as well as ongoing philosophical inquiry into the
classification of senses into higher and lower. In line with this, the
Element can be seen as part of a body of research which started with
the study of literary synaesthetic metaphors by Stephen Ullmann
(1937), and which has continued until now thanks to the existence of
large language corpora that have made possible the shift from studying
synesthesia as found in poetry to that found in everyday language use
in a multilingual context. In this sense, an aspect of the booklet I
found particularly interesting was the connection with linguistic
typology, and particularly the criticism of studies on linguistic
synesthesia that claim universality on the classification of the
senses relying on a small number of languages which belong to a very
restricted number of language families. While Winter & Strik-Lievers’
study is still very far away from establishing any kind of
universality, the investigation of a relatively high number of
languages representing considerable  typological variety is an
important move in the direction of exploring common occurrences in
synesthetic mappings.
Researchers coming from numerous fields may be interested in this
publication. Cognitive linguists, specifically those working within
the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, will likely engage in the
discussions that Winter & Strik-Lievers bring up on this work. The
tendency to think about the abstract in terms of the concrete as a
prominent trait of human language has been defended by scholars in
this field like Lakoff & Johnson (1980) or Kövecses (2002); and this
notion has influenced studies on the hierarchy of the senses through
the belief that senses involving direct contact with the source of the
stimulus, such as touch, would be more accessible than those not
implying such a contact, like sight. Therefore, touch would be
expected to appear more commonly as a source in the literature and
corpora  and sight as a target. However, given that the evidence from
this meta-analysis points to the symmetry of sight in its appearance
in the source/target dichotomy, researchers may be moved to reconsider
their prior assumptions and scrutinize data from different languages
and genres before reaching any conclusion.
A strong aspect of the booklet is its capacity to connect the
historical context and literature on the topic of linguistic
synesthesia with the current state of the art, as well as the
invitation to further research. Through their meta-analysis, Winter &
Strik-Lievers show that, while the idea of a hierarchy of the senses
has motivated much speculation and research into the topic of
linguistic synesthesia, specific mappings need to be explored to
provide solutions to problems that remain unanswered in the
literature, such as the reason for the dominance of the touch→sound
mapping or the affinity of sight and sound in linguistic synesthesia.
The reconceptualization of intersensory transfers from a hierarchy of
senses towards a network, where some mappings display an asymmetry in
the senses between source and target, is a meaningful conclusion to be
drawn from the booklet, together with the proposal of differences
between the senses that may motivate the asymmetries. Those
asymmetries, however, need to be tested with language-specific data,
which might explain relevant phenomena, such as which perceptual
experiences are easier to verify intersubjectively, or how much each
sense is valued in different cultures.
For that reason, I read this Element with enthusiasm. Winter &
Strik-Lievers present the enormous possibilities that the field of
linguistic synesthesia offers for researchers aiming to carry out both
observational and experimental studies into this area. The lack of
specific answers to the crosslinguistic questions that are still open
in the literature provides a meaningful opportunity for researchers
working in cognitive linguistics, since, as the authors emphasize at
the end of their work, this is an exciting field of inquiry that is
ripe for new discoveries. Hopefully, the booklet will offer further
motivation to carry out those studies.
REFERENCES
Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford
University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of
Chicago Press.
Ronga, I., Bazzanella, C., Rossi, F., & Iannetti, G. (2012).
Linguistic synaesthesia, perceptual synaesthesia, and the interaction
between multiple sensory modalities. Pragmatics & Cognition, 20(1),
135–167.
Strik-Lievers, F. (2015). Synaesthesia: A corpus-based study of
cross-modal directionality. Functions of Language, 22(1), 69–95.
Ullmann, S. (1937). Synaesthetic metaphors in William Morris. (An
essay on the decorative art of the pre-Raphaelites). Angol Filológiai
Tanulmányok/ Hungarian Studies in English, 2, 143–151.
Ullmann, S. (1959). The Principles of Semantics. Jackson, Son.
Winter, B., & Strik-Lievers, F. (2025). Linguistic Synesthesia. A
Meta-analysis. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009519182
Zhao, Q., Huang, C.-R., & Ahrens, K. (2019). Directionality of
linguistic synesthesia in Mandarin: A corpus-based study. Lingua, 232,
102744. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102744.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
David Carrasco Coquillat is a junior researcher with an M.A. in
Language Science and Spanish Linguistics and an M.Ed. in English as a
Foreign Language Teaching. His main research interests are
sociolinguistics, geolinguistics and language contact. He is currently
looking for a PhD position where he can continue his research work.



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