DALS Graduate’s Paper Published in Linguistic Research
Research & Scholarly Activities
A DALS graduate, Zhong Yin’s paper related to her DALS thesis has just been published in Linguistic Research.
Zhong, Yin, and Chu-ren Huang. "Sweetness or Mouthfeel: A corpus-based study of the conceptualization of taste." Linguistic Research. 37.3 (2020): 359-387.
http://isli.khu.ac.kr/journal/content/data/37_3/1.pdf
Based on an analysis of Chinese online food reviews containing descriptions of desserts, this paper shows that ‘mouthfeel’, a multisensory concept, is strongly preferred over ‘sweetness’ when discussing the taste quality of desserts. It is found that ‘mouthfeel’ is associated with words from all the sensory domains, including both sensory (e.g., vision, hearing, touch) and abstract (e.g., mental state) concepts. The highly non-exclusive characteristic of gustatory sensation suggests that it might be the most connected sensory modality among the human senses, and the cross-modality expressions indicating personal preferences further imply the subjective propensity of the gustatory sense. Our study adds to the existing literature the interrelationship among sensory modalities through language use, and further sheds light on the interactions between language, cognition, and culture.
