studi linguistici e filologici online 8.1 dipartimento di ... · studi linguistici e filologici...
TRANSCRIPT
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online ISSN 1724-5230 Volume 8.1 (2010) – pagg. 109-157 S. Ricci – “A hierarchy of senses: does it make sense? On linguistic synaesthesia and its directionality”
A HIERARCHY OF SENSES: DOES IT MAKE SENSE?
ON LINGUISTIC SYNAESTHESIA AND ITS DIRECTIONALITY SARA RICCI
1. Raising the problem
The blood that pulses through our veins is a motion which
accompanies all of our life. We can easily feel it by placing our
fingers on the wrists or on the neck. The touch is the only sense we
have available to make our body detect the pulse: it cannot be seen, or
listened to, nor smelt or tasted. When the point comes to include
pulsetaking in the medical discourse and to appreciate all its features
in order to relate them to the diagnosis of illnesses and consequent
healing practices, the perception of the pulse become crucial.
Can human touch be enough to properly perceive it in all its
features? What is exactly perceived under the fingers? How can the
qualities of perception be described and unmistakably shared in the
medical community, so that a discourse on the pulse can be pursued?
The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and
Chinese Medicine by Shigheisa Kuryiama (Kuriyama, 2002) is a
beautifully written book of the history of medicine which, among
other fascinating topics, also addresses this problem of perceiving and
communicating perceptions. For what is concerned here, it is
interesting to mention that, according to Kuryiama, the dramatic
divergence of the Greek and the Chinese approach to pulsetaking
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
110
stems precisely from the two different solutions given to the problem
of conveying sensory perceptions through language. Basically,
Chinese physicians relied on touch, while Greek physicians did not.
They preferred to investigate the phenomenon of pulsation relying on
the sense of sight and describing it through visual metaphors,
considering vision a better source for an objective and transparent
knowledge. The claim underlying Kuriyama’s book, and the question
moving the investigation presented in this article, is that the
relationship between sensory perception and language to describe it
presupposes a culture-specific attitude toward the senses. More
precisely, toward a hierarchy of the reliability of the senses as
instruments to get to know the world. Is this claim tenable? Can
linguistics help to cast some light on the problem? The following
pages sketch a possible answer to these questions.
2. The field of investigation: synaesthesia
To investigate the problem from the linguistic point of view, it is
necessary to find an area in which perception and language are tightly
linked. Synaesthetic expressions come to hand: they are all resolved in
expressing and defining sensory perceptions and, moreover, they
make different perceptual modalities merge. Synaesthesia, in fact,
connects different sensory realms: as is exemplified in the
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics “Keats’ ‘heard melodies
are sweet’ evokes a clearly auditory concept (heard melodies) in terms
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
111
belonging to the realm of taste (sweetness). The expression a cold
light is another example of a synesthetic metaphor. In this case, light,
which is linked to the visual domain, is defined in terms of coldness,
which belongs to the tactile domain.”
2.1 Theoretical premises
Synaesthesia will here be considered an instance of metaphor.
“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind
of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003, p. 5): as
metaphor is a way of conceptualizing knowledge, so it is synaesthesia,
which focuses in particular on the understanding and construal of
perceptions. The source-and-target principle found to be at the basis of
metaphor according to the Lakoff and Johnson’s account (Lakoff and
Johnson, 2003) applies also to synaesthesia. Here, in fact, the role of
source and target elements are interpreted by sensory modalities: the
source modality is the one providing the quality of perception, while
the target modality is the modality which experiences the object to be
described. Take “sweet face”, “warm voice” or “sharp flavour”: one
feels sweetness with the sense of taste (source), but “sweet” is applied
to a visual perception, that is a face (target); as for the second
example, warmth is felt by the sense of touch (source), but here
“warm” comes to define the quality of a voice, which is an auditory
perception (target); “sharp flavour” combines touch (source) and taste
(target).
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
112
3. Synaesthesia and its directionality: a path to cognitive and
perceptual universals?
One of the earliest studies which links findings about linguistic
synaesthesia with an arrangement of sensory modalities, is
Synaesthetic adjectives: a possible law of semantic change, by Joseph
Williams (Williams, 1976), in turn based on Stephen de Ullmann’s
studies on European poetry (de Ullmann,1945; Ullmann, 1951).
Williams investigates English sensory adjectives in a diachronic
perspective and reports that “sensory words in English have
systematically transferred from the physiologically least
differentiating, most evolutionary primitive sensory modalities to the
most differentiating, most advanced, but not vice versa” (Williams,
1976, p. 464-465). The physiology of senses appears in this quotation:
in a few words, the discourse shifts an historical lexical analysis to an
evaluation of perceptual possibilities of the human sensorium.
The distinction of the senses in “least / most differentiating” and
“primitive / advanced” implies a hierarchy of the perceptive efficacy
of senses: what should it be based on? As can be read in that paper,
the bases are the writings of Aristotle, Democritus, Aquinas, plus
descriptions of human phylogenesis and onthogenesis. Williams
briefly describes the account that the three philosophers give of human
sensorium as bearing the order sight-hearing-smell-taste-touch, then
the physiological sequence of maturation (measured in myelinization
of neural cortices) of the senses: tactile first, then olfactory, then either
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
113
optic-acoustic or acoustic-optic. Subsequently, Williams suggests that
“some principle of sequential relationship might underlie not only
semantic change but other sensory systems as well” and that
“connections might exist among ontogeny, phylogeny, the
neurophysiology of sensation, cognition, and naming” (Williams,
1976, pp. 472, 473). Those claims are what makes William’s study
one of the bases of present investigation on synaesthesia (Cacciari,
2008, Shen and Aisenman, 2008, Brown and Anderson, 2006, p. 459,
Catricalà, 2008), but they are not completely sharable.
In fact, as a first point, the physiological development of senses
in itself does not prove anything related to a supposed hierarchy: on
the contrary, it could substantiate the opposite claim. In fact, if it is
true that there is a sense more important than the others, it would be
better that an infant has it perfectly active as soon as possible. Thus
this sense may be considered hierarchically the first, the one necessary
as a foundation for the further development of the organism. Hence, it
follows that touch should be first in the rank. As for the reference to
Aristotle, Democritus and Aquinas: their findings about human
sensorium may be biased by their inquiry for symmetry and order, by
their urgence to find in the Man a hierarchy that may recall the one
they were discovering in the Universe.1
1 Just to mention an example, in the tenth book of Confessions, by Aquinas, it is clear that speculation on senses is due to a reflection on the right path to follow for the human soul. In that book there is matter to hate each sense and make all of them in turn repulsive and inferior to the others.
Furthermore, the scientific
equipment these scholars could take advantage of was lacking of the
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
114
machinery which now allows us to empirically test theories and
hypotheses on the human body and discover a much more about
human physiology and evolution.
We have no objection to the fact that with his schema Williams
pointed out a regularity of the semantic change in English, but it
seems reasonable to doubt the validity of the direct connection of it
with actual physiological facts: this is presented by the author himself
as a possibility and a suggestion for further investigation and
clarification (Williams, 1976, p. 472-473). In spite of that, the link
between semantic change and sensorial hierarchy has been taken as a
matter of fact and Williams summarizes his findings in the following
schema.
Figure 1: Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities according
to Williams (Williams, 1976, p. 463).
This same figure is published at the beginning of many papers
and quoted as fundamental in various works (Shen and Aisenman,
2008; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001a, b; Cacciari, 2008;
Catricalà, 2008) on the directionality of synaesthesia and on the
relationship among perceptual modalities: in doing this, the secondary
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
115
sources have transformed the results of a study in the history of the
English language into an ultimate universal cognitive truth.
3.1 Controversial issues
Yeshayahu Shen and his co-workers believe in such a truth and
investigate synaesthesia in order to corroborate the validity of the
hierarchical relationship of the senses and of the directionality of
mapping. Their purpose is to apply William’s and Ullmann’s findings
to languages other than English. Therefore, part of their research is
devoted to Hebrew poetry and analyzes a corpus made of
contemporary poems (20th century). Shen proposes to a group of
informants a series of synaesthetic expressions following the mapping
proposed by Williams, paired with a synaesthesia with opposite
directionality: subjects read pairs of synaesthesias, “each pair
consisting of a metaphor extracted from a Hebrew poem (e.g., “a cold
light”) and a counterpart consisting of the same modalities but
reflecting the opposite directionality (“a lighted coldness”) (Shen,
1997, p. 51).
standard reversed A cold light
A sweet silence
A lighted coldness
A silent sweetness
Subjects are asked to indicate which are the synaesthesias they
find more natural and comprehensible and, lately, to recall them. The
result show that synaesthesias following the standard mapping are
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
116
judged more comprehensible and they are also better recalled. The
findings in the Hebrew corpus are coherent with the hypothesis of a
directionality, confirming that directionality “reflects a preference for
a more ‘natural’ or ‘basic’ structure overits inverse” (Shen, 1997, p.
50).
A subsequent study, by Shen and Ravid Aisenman, on
synaesthesia in everyday Hebrew language (Shen and Aisenman,
2008), also takes into account the easiness of generation of contexts
for isolated synaesthesia. Expressions following standard mapping
result to be more easily included in a context generated on the spot
than the reversed expressions. What is the reason for the preference of
such a mapping? According to Shen’s and his co-workers’ approach,
the reason is cognitive and it operates through the same rules
governing metaphor: “Synaesthesia is but a special case of a cognitive
principle that applies to metaphors in general. The principle states:
Mapping from a more concrete concept onto a less concrete one is
more natural than the inverse. [...] Applying this general cognitive
principle to synaesthesia suggests that the concepts belonging to the
lower senses, such as touch and taste, are more ‘concrete’ (hence more
accessible) than those belonging to higher senses, such as sound and
sight” (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 111).
The accessibility and concreteness of senses is considered a
property of the senses itself, so much that it spontaneously triggers the
arrangement of the senses in a hierarchy, and their distinction in
“lower” and “higher” senses.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
117
From such a perspective, the conclusion is that if a pattern is
preferred in synaesthesia, then it should be due to a principle intrinsic
to the nature of the senses. Considered that all human beings are
equipped with senses, it follows that such a hierarchical principle
relating sensory perceptions should be universally active. That is why
it is found active in English and Hebrew languages alike.
Is this the whole story? The directionality found in synaesthesia
in Hebrew mirrors the one found in English, true. However is this
enough to say that such a directionality is a universal cognitive fact,
governing the computation of sensory perception? Are findings based
on the analysis of a list of adjective-noun couplets conducted by small
groups of informants enough to declare the universality of a principle
governing human construal and communication of perception?
Perhaps it is not the case to establish such a universality.
Linguistic counterexamples to the hierarchy can be found as well, as is
illustrated below. There are studies on synaesthesia, in fact, which
come up with radically different descriptions of the relationship
among senses.
Maria Bretones Callejas analyzed synaesthesia in the works of
the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel prize in Literature
1995, born in 1939). Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive account is the
theoretical framework of her work too, for which metaphor, therefore
synaesthesia, is a “cognitive device that allows us to think and
experience one thing in terms of another, thanks to the mapping of
conceptual structure from one mental domain to another” (Bretones
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
118
Callejas, 2001, p. 1). Hence, she does not reject the directionality of
mapping from a more accessible modality to a less accessible, but
objects to the fact that this directionality must be universally
established and recurrent: according to her data, the choice of the
source and target modalities cannot be predicted on the basis of a
unique cognitive constraint.
Callejas analyzes synaesthetic expressions from fifty poems by
Heaney (e.g. coarse croacking, thick chorus, clean sound). She draws
a schema derived from all the types of mapping exhibited by Heaney’s
synaesthesias and the result is quite different from the one presented
on page 5.
Figure 2: Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities in
Heaney’s poetry (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 10)
Callejas argues that accessibility is not a structural property of
the sense involved, as proposed by the followers of Williams’
schematization: “accessibility will function according to the meaning
intended or perceived, never according to more or less accessible
sensory modalities” (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 12). Accessibility of
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
119
a sensory domain is thus linked to the meaning of the synaesthesia, to
the function of it in the discourse. In that, context is a primary variable
to be considered in order to assess the role of the sensory expression
in the synaesthesia.
Further, Callejas’ analysis is not restricted to couplets
“adjective-name”: English language offers more than the single option
“adjective-name” to express synaesthesia. Therefore, not only phrases
like clean new music and stony flavours are examined, but also I
savoured the rich crash (hearing is tasting), feeling our eyes on his
back (seeing is touching), inhale the absolute weather (feeling is
smelling). Studies like Shen and Aisenman’s restrict their analysis to
adjectival syntagms and systematically avoid analysis of context:2
2 “Note that expressions were artificially constructed by the authors, and were introduced to the participants as isolated or de-contextualized expressions [...]. The motivation for using isolated or de-contextualized expressions was that the potential influence of the context on the comprehension of those expressions would destroy the possibility of validity testing our hypothesis. This being said, it is clear that further research is needed that will test the exact influence of contextual factors on the comprehension of those expressions” (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 120).
as
far as methodology is concerned, it can be objected that discarding
elements which may potentially influence the comprehension of an
expression, may compromise the comprehension itself. Thus, elements
marked as “not natural” in the study could have been perfectly
understood in a proper context. There is no need to remember that
natural linguistic expressions never occur with no context, but what
here matters most is that the principle of ad hoc categories on which
the analysis of these expressions rests (Shen, 1997, pp. 40, 56) is
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
120
active only in the presence of a context which enables the construction
of a category: hence, ruling out the context may obliterate part of the
heuristic value of the study. Any attempt to ground results in an
alleged “naturalness” of the expression collapses if context (the
natural environment of language) is negated.
In fact, the results of Callejas’ study, which takes context into
account and considers the real conditions of production and
understanding of language, challenge the schematization driven by
analyses of data which ignore context. The crucial difference is that
Callejas places the very reason of the accessibility of a concept in the
context, the aspect that other studies discard. Moreover, she provides
evidence that directionality of mapping may not follow William’s
hierarchical generalization. Her approach to the sensory dimension is
such that all senses are vehicles of experience, at the same rank.
Callejas shows that many synaesthetic patterns are active in the
English language: experience constantly stimulates all senses and the
focus on one modality or on the other is chosen by the sensibility of
the subject. Any stimulation may echo responses in potentially all the
other modalities.
A broader analysis of the relationship between language and
sensory perception cannot disregard verbs. This is not the place to
investigate the issue thoroughly, but we make reference to a study
which contributes to clarify the wide range of patterns in expressing
sensorium that verbs in different languages may exhibit. If a unique
cognitive constraint was at the basis of conceiving perception, there
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
121
should not be so much crosslinguistic variation, as it contrarily is. The
contribution comes from the work by B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
(1999), who proposes an analysis of the sensorium starting from
polysemy of perception verbs in English, Basque and Spanish.
Ibarretxe points out how perception verbs can be distinguished
into three main groups definable as: verbs of experience, where the
reception of the stimulus is independent from the will of the
experiencer (e.g. Peter saw the birds); verbs of activity, where the
process of perception is consciously controlled by the experiencer
(e.g. Peter looked at the birds); verbs of percept or copulative, where
the subject of the verbs is the stimulus perceived (e.g. Peter looked
happy) (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 42-44). “Viberg (1984)
establishes the differences between experience and activity verbs on
the one hand and copulative verbs on the other, on the basis of what
he calls ‘base selection’, i.e. the choice of grammatical subject among
the deep semantic case roles associated with a certain verb. In the
former case, verbs are ‘experiencer-based’; that is to say the verb
takes an animate being with certain mental experience as a subject. In
the latter case, verbs are ‘source-based’ or ‘phenomenon-based’, as
the verb takes the experienced entity as a subject” (Ibarretxe-
Antuñano, 1999, pp. 44-45).
Experience and active perception verbs form a single macro-
group because they construe perception having the experiencer as
subject; copulative verbs are less focused on the experiencer. The role
of the experience is a key element in this kind of verbal analysis. In
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
122
other words, the core of the linguistic analysis of perception lies in
understanding how language allows the construal of experience for the
person who is experiencing.
Comparing English, Spanish and Basque, the study focuses on
experience and activity verbs, because percept verbs, “unlike English,
are relatively poor in Spanish and almost non-existant in Basque”
(Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 53). On the basis of the same Viberg's
work, Ibarretxe reports that a possible schema for the lexicalization of
perception verbs could be such as follows:
sight > hearing > touch > smell/taste
Languages, therefore, could be classified on the basis of this
hierarchy, according to the number of senses they lexicalize. “For
instance, English has the five modalities: see, hear, feel, taste and
smell; Malay has four: lihat ‘vision’, dengar ‘hearing’, rasa ‘feel,
taste’ and hidu ‘smell’; Swedish has three: se ‘vision’, höra ‘hearing’
and känna ‘feel, taste, smell’” (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 74). The
hierarchy works as a sort of implication: if a language has the sense of
smell lexicalized, this entails that sight, hearing and touch are
lexicalized too. It is apparent that not all languages discriminate the
sensorium in five senses: as a consequence of this, any proposal to
ascertain the physiological relations among senses on a linguistic basis
must be taken cautiously.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
123
The Basque language lexicalizes sensorium in three areas,
seemingly sight hearing and touch: in reality, the term for touch in
Basque comes from the one for smell, contradicting the directionality.
“In the first group of experiencer verbs Basque has a lexical
item for every sense except for the sense of touch, where the verbs
sumatu and nabaritu are to be used. These verbs both mean ‘to
perceive’ and ‘to notice’. Although both verbs refer to general
perception, it is very interesting to notice that the verb sumatu is
related to the sense of smell. This verb comes from the noun suma,
which means ‘smell, sense of smell’” (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p.
47).
The meaning of the verb for ‘to perceive’ is related to the sense
of smell and it covers an area wider than it should be in Viberg’s
directionality: in fact, a term for all perceptions should not be allowed
to come from a “low” position. However, it happens, undermining the
unconditional validity of the hierarchy.
Basque is a language not amenable to schematizations in many
other senses. When Ibarretxe’s thesis presents a chapter on etymology
of English, Spanish and Basque verbs of perception, functional to the
study of polysemy, etymologies are reconstructed back to
Indoeuropean forms: even if the operation succeeds for English and
Spanish lexicon, Basque words do not comfortably fit in any family
picture with those roots. As Francisco Villar notes, there is no
language in the world which could be certainly considered of the same
genetic group as Basque. (Villar, 1997, p. 511). It is widely known
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
124
that Basque is a non-Indoeuropean language, spoken by European
people living in a territory now limited to a small area in the north of
Pyrenees, across the border between Spain and France. Euskara (the
name of the Basque language in Basque) is spoken by a population
settled in that area since the Neolithic Age. Language changed in the
millennia, of course, and Basque people were attacked by other
populations in the prehistoric and the historic age. However, they were
never obliterated by the populations of Indoeuropean roots who
entered Europe starting from 4400 and 3400 b. C., then diffused in all
the continent during many subsequent waves of colonizations.
Therefore, Basque are the only direct descendants of European people
before Indoeuropeans. In their legends and folklore, traits of the
antique matriarcal and agricultural culture of Neolithic Europe still
survive.
Clearly, they underwent a long and slow indoeuropeization
process, due to the surrounding cultural environment, but their own
language and culture is still peculiar in Europe.
Such a picture may be useful to understand how a common
cultural heritage may unify languages that are normally considered
profoundly diverse. Our focus is precisely on the construal of
perceptions: many reasons to keep one sense above the other may
stem from a specific communal cultural background, far and wide, not
in the commonalities shared by all humans by the mere fact that they
are humans.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
125
It is apparent, then, that the question of a hierarchy of senses is
not solvable with a mere count of linguistic examples corresponding
to a hierarchy or another. With the analysis of language alone, it is not
possible to investigate the totality of a sensory experience, or to know
the precise relationship between the modalities with which the
experiencer is receiving the stimuli. Analysis of grammatical
structures, syntax, idioms, language change, may highlight aspects of
the way in which we give meaning to perceptions and how we direct
attention on aspects of the stimuli surrounding us, but it cannot
thorougly clarify reciprocal physiological and neurological
relationships among our senses. Mechanisms and functioning in
sensory organs, brain maps, hierarchies of bodily structures cannot be
derived from a linguistic research only. Therefore, a directionality of
mapping in simile and synaesthesia is not sufficient to entail a
hierarchy of value of the senses: there is more to be investigated
before one can assert this. The claim of a set of “lower” senses, with
scarce distinctiveness and a sort of dullness in perceiving, in contrast
to a “higher” set, smarter in detecting differences is somewhat
medieval and hardly tenable. In fact, distinctiveness and accessibility,
concreteness and immediateness seem to be properties of particular
ways of conceiving perceptions, not entailing a biological hierarchy of
the senses. The fact that a so-called “lower to higher” mapping is
found prevailing in many literatures and languages all over the world,
biases the reader to consider the alleged hierarchy as universal, valid
for all human communities, for all human beings, hence cognitive and
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
126
biological. On the contrary, the idea that accessibility, concreteness,
“readiness” of a sense (as far as it can be detected by language) are
parameters to be assessed on a purely cultural scale, is to be put
forward. If a description of the reciprocal relation among senses has to
be done through the analysis of linguistic expressions, it must be
considered an instance of the cultural experience of the human being,
not a mirror of bodily functions or basic cognitive constraints.
4. Cultural aspects: the sensotype hypothesis
Languages show a high variability in the classification of
percepts (such as wider or narrower vocabularies for color names and
taste words or different sets of perception verbs) which nevertheless
does not compromise the overall ability to distinguish perceptions:
“there is no indication that the absence of a term implies an inability
to discriminate” (Goody, 2002, p. 18). The analysis of such
differences, all stemming from the same basic physiological
perceptual ability in humans, is the approach pursued by the so called
anthropology of the senses, which studies sensorial perceptions in the
different cultures and the complex of values and meanings attributed
to them.
As Vincenzo Matera states, in fact, sensoriality is socially
conditioned: the assignment of meaning to what is perceived, can be
done only under the influence of social and cultural elements which
combine to bring about the significance of the sensory experience:
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
127
“a man in isolation – thesis implicitly but never overtly formulated by
many scholars, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure – cannot
produce meaning. The ability of producing meanings and, for what we
are concerned with, of developing a sensoriality (i.e. a meaningful
perception) grows and takes place in the individual only in virtue of
his belonging to a collectivity, in the context of the socialization
process” (Matera, 2002, p. 10)3
.
The sensorial articulation and the relationship among senses,
being a cultural fact, is not identical in all societies (Matera, 2002, p.
15): Jack Goody (Goody, 2002), points out that not only may the
reciprocal relation among the five senses vary, but also that the
distinction of senses in the five abilities of sight, hearing, touch, taste,
smell is not universally diffused.4
Following this approach Walter Ong suggests: “it is useful to
think of cultures in terms of the organization of sensorium. [...] The
differences in cultures which we have just suggested can be thought of
Also, the reliability accorded to
perception in a sense or another is determined by cultural biases.
3 Original version: “un uomo in solitudine – tesi implicita anche se mai formulata con chiarezza da molti studiosi a cominciare da Ferdinand de Saussure – non può produrre significato. La capacità di produrre senso e, per la prospettiva che qui ci interessa, di sviluppare una sensorialità (vale a dire, una percezione dotata di senso) cresce e si installa nell’individuo solo grazie alla sua appartenenza a una collettività, nell'ambito del processo di socializzazione”. 4 Europe and Asia are the areas in which the five-part conceptualization is more widespread, but there are cases in Africa for which this does not hold (see, for instance, the Hausa language, which employs just two verbs of perception – Ritchie, 1991).
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
128
as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part
determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture. [...]
Man’s sensory perceptions are abundant and overwhelming. He
cannot attend to them all at once. In great part a given culture teaches
him one or another way of productive specialization. It brings him to
organize his sensorium by attending to some types of perceptions
more than others, by making an issue of certain ones while relatively
neglecting other ones” (Ong, 1991, pp. 28-29).
With “sensorium”, Ong means the entire sensory apparatus, plus
the values and the meanings ascribed to it by the various cultures. A
sort of culturally defined frame of perception, inside which all
personal sensory experiences find place and shape.
Working in this perspective, Mallory Wober proposes a
framework called “the sensotype hypothesis”, based on the idea that
“the prevailing patterns of childhood intake and proliferation of
information from the various sense modalities differ according to
culture” (Wober, 1991, p. 33). These words harmonize with those of
Ong: “In great part a given culture teaches <the child> one or another
way of productive specialization. It brings him to organize his
sensorium by attending to some types of perception more than others,
by making an issue of certain ones while relatively neglecting other
ones” (Ong, 1991, p. 28).
With “sensotype”, then, a particular configuation of relationship
among senses is intended, a culturally determined pattern in treating
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
129
information coming from the different modalities and a consequent
culture-specific way of attending and responding to it.
4.1 Can a word be coloured?
The “sensotype hypothesis” proposed by Wober calls to
reconsider the role of senses in psychological tests. Psycholinguistics
also makes use of perceptual tests to assess performances related to
the functioning of language in the mind. One of the most famous and
widely practised tests is the so-called Stroop test. Bearing in mind
Wober’s hypothesis for which subjects respond to tasks according to
their specific sensotype, it is worth saying some words about this test.
John Ridley Stroop published a psycholinguistic landmark
article on selective attention and interference, based on the speed of
reading colour words and naming colours (Stroop, 1935). The material
for the tests are cards with colour words or squares of solid colours.
Control stimuli were colour names written in black ink5
5 Black is considered as a “non-colour”, an unmarked hue, due to its being the most common ink used in text printing.
and the
coloured squares. Experimental stimuli were colour words printed in
coloured ink, not matching the meaning of the word: for instance, the
word GREEN is printed in red ink, or the word ORANGE is printed in
blue. The experiments ran by Stroop were three, but the most famous
are the first two: in the first one, subjects had to read aloud the black
words (control situation), then read the coloured words printed in
incongruent ink; in the second one, subjects had to name the colour of
a series of coloured squares (control situation), then name the colour
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
130
of the ink of the colour-incongruent printed words. The subjects took
considerably longer to name the colour of the ink of a colour-word
(printed in a mismatching colour) than the squares, making evident an
interference of the meaning of the written word in the selection of
attention. The mismatch between the perceived information (the actual
colour of the ink) and the conceptual information (the colour
conveyed by the meaning of the word) interferes with the selection of
the proper stimulus to give voice to. In the third experiment, subjects
were trained for eight days to name ink colours of incompatible
words: they got a better result than in the pre-test without training (i.e.
they were more accurate and fast in saying the right colour, not
confused by the contrasting meaning of the word). With this, Stroop
demonstrated that experience influences the ability of directing
selective attention.
The efficacy of the Stroop test to investigate the field of
selective attention has been proved by more than 60 years of studies in
psycholinguistics based on it or on modified versions for special
purposes (MacLeod, 1991).
The applicability of the Stroop test presupposes subjects with
mastery in reading and in colour naming. For its structure, the test is
basically a visual one, connected to language via colour lexicon.
Stroop chose subject vision as a route to their mind and to their way of
selecting information during perception. He could, we suppose, have
equally considered the readiness in naming the source of a sound
when the subject sees a violin but hears a trumpet, compared to when
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
131
the subject just hears the voice of an instrument and has to name it.
But he chose vision, with colours and written words. Any researcher,
as a human being, is a member of a particular culture: hence bears the
sensotype specific for that culture. That is, the researcher is more
skilled in those senses his sensotype values most. Some of the
researcher’s senses would prevail as a vehicle of intake of information
(to say it with Wober), according to the organization of the sensorium
he has learnt to be the most productive for intellectual purposes (Ong,
1991, p. 28). It is natural that he projects onto his fellow human beings
the same sensory organization he perceives active on himself,
therefore creating tests according to this. We believe that the choice of
a visual and reading test is partly due to the sensotype of Stroop
himself and of his operating in a culture where vision is considered the
prototypical vehicle in acquiring information from the environment,
and where literacy and colour names are given as a basic endowment
of almost everyone. However, persons from other cultures may be
bearers of different sensotypes: they may have been taught to organize
their sensorium in a different way, their balance of skills among the
senses may not be analogue to the one of the researcher.
Further, the relevance of perceptual characteristics in a single
modality may be profoundly diverse: in the field of vision all human
beings detect the same spectrum of colours (all the wavelengths of the
visible light), but different languages do not segment and label it in
the same way (one of the latest studies about this topic is Mitterer et
al., 2009).
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
132
Gizey people (living in North Camerun) use colour words
mainly to specify domestic animals and liquids, as Roberto Ajello
reports. A limited system includes general terms that can be assigned
to any type of referent (Ajello, 2007). On the other hand the specific
colours for domestic animals are around twenty, accounting for the
different hues and patterns of the coat of sheep, cows and goats. These
terms allow a precise description of each head, to make each single
animal clearly identifiable. Gizey economy and social organization, in
fact, is based on the possession and breeding of domestic animals:
mostly cows, then goats and sheep, have a high functional importance
in Gizey culture. Therefore their colour is a highly salient property
and must be expressed clearly.
On the contrary, the colour of plants, environmental elements,
and manufacts is not relevant. Describing those objects focusing on
their colour is not a linguistic practice in Gizey. It is useless to denote
the colour, because it is there, existing in the situational context,
glaringly obvious and predictable.
It is not a variable that is necessary to distinguish one element
from the other. As for plants, features such as the structure and the
characteristics which make them edible or not are relevant, not their
nuances of green. As for objects, colour is not a salient feature to
identify an item among others.
A series of objects which differ only in colour is a consequence
of high technology and industrial production: clothes, furniture, house
paintings, and so on are produced in identical series, differing
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
133
exclusively in colour. Hence it follows that colour, in a society with a
technology for serial production, has a high saliency in the process of
identifying objects, hence it is a property that selects speakers’
attention.6
In a traditional economy as the Gizey’s, where technology is
extremely simple, features of manufacts are predictable by the
material in which they are realized, as predictable are the hues of
environmental elements, which do not need to be distinguished by
colour. A cup is a cup, a bush is a bush, no matter the colour. Colour
for objects is not a salient perceptual property in Gizey culture.
In North-Camerun, the schooling system speaks French:
therefore a Gizey who goes to school learns the French terms for
colours and the way they work in French. Still, their conceptual
mastery of colour is traditional. As Ajello reports: “a high school
student’s answer to my question on the colour of grass is emblematic
‘But what is the colour of grass? Grass is grass, it has no colour. The
colour is vert, I don’t know, I’ve got to ask to my grandfather’ (Ajello,
2007).7
In such a context, would a Stroop test be conceivable? Would
the instruction ‘name the colour of this word’ make much sense for a
Gizey, given that for him there is no point in describing the colour of a
series of graphic signs? The linking of colour perception and language
6 This phenomenon is also pointed out by Maria Grossmann, with particular reference to the production of artificial colours (Grossmann, 1988, pp. 5, 6). 7 Original text: “La risposta di uno studente di liceo alla mia domanda sul colore dell’erba è emblematica: ‘Ma di che colore è l’erba? L’erba è erba, non ha colore. Il colore è vert, non so, bisogna chiedere a mio nonno’”.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
134
in Gizey is a sample of how peculiar the connection could be, creating
a system incompatible with the one westerners are used to, which is
focused on completely different referents and parameters of variation.
When we are conscious of the fact that the relationship between
colour and words is valid for every language in a different way, and
that the relationship between colours and objects is a purely cultural
fact, how do we interpret the data coming from a Stroop test? Reading
is a culture-specific ability, and naming colours too. Having said that,
what is the scope of the research stemming from Stroop tests?
Two are the hypotheses.
One: it uses reading, colour naming and reciprocal interferences
as a linguistic activity easy to be tested, in order to gather a series of
data upon which to draw psychological models of lexical access and
meaning processing in human mind. It is performed in a particular
condition of literacy and chromonimy just for practical reasons, but
general results can be extended farther.
Two: it uses reading, colour naming and reciprocal interferences
as a linguistic activity easy to be tested, in order to gather a series of
data upon which to draw psychological models of lexical access
during reading and colour naming in cultures that make use of written
language and have a colour system adequate to the test.
It would be interesting to carry out further research to determine
which of the hypotheses is correct. In doing this, psycholinguistics and
field linguistics should cooperate in order to benefit each of the
experience and frameworks of the other. At the same time, emphasis
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
135
on vision and colour must not distract from the analysis of other
perceptual systems and their linguistic representation: researchers
should be aware of the social constuction of perception they are
moving from, not to let it bias the research they are carrying on. As
David Howes provocatorily declares, “scholars like Berlin and Kay
(1969), who focus exclusively on the comparison of colour
terminologies, never thinking to compare odour, or taste vocabularies,
have plainly failed to transcend our culture’s sensory biases” (Howes,
1991, p. 172).
5. Synaesthesia and sensotype: a matter of taste
The analysis of synaesthesia is entirely based on sensory
vocabulary, therefore “our culture’s sensory biases” may be subtly
active in directing our interpretation of data. The sensotype
hypothesis may provide the research on synaesthetic expressions with
a further perspective, that could be profitable in the analysis of
problematic cases. To propose an application of this, two studies about
sensory perception in Indonesia are confronted in this section: they
touch similar issues and they both find problematic points dealing
with the sense of taste. One is a linguistic study, on directionality
principle in synaesthetic metaphors in Indonesian (Shen and Gil,
2008). The other is an anthropological study on Weyéwa, a population
living in Sumba, Indonesia and about the role of taste and taste words
in the social interaction (Kuipers, 1991).
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
136
5.1 Sweet fragrance from Indonesia
Shen and Gil’s study starts out with a synaesthesia used as a
name for a supermarket in the town of Pontianak, Indonesia: harum
manis, i.e. sweet fragrance. Could it have been manis harum, i.e.
fragrant sweetness?, the authors ask themselves. The directionality
principle they hypothesize makes them inclined to say no (Shen and
Gil, 2008).
They conduct a survey on Indonesian with a method similar to
the one applied to Hebrew in previous studies: but the procedure of
composing “direct” and “reversed” synaesthesias and of making
native speakers judge the appropriateness of the expression is a false
start. In fact, to find a native speaker of Indonesian is not easy:
“nobody speaks Standard Indonesian as their first native language;
children acquiring Indonesian start out with one or more varieties of
colloquial Indonesian, and only later acquire the standard language”
(Shen and Gil, 2008). Speakers continuously move between acrolect
and basilect and it is not possible to say which is the variety in which
subjects process the de-contextualized submitted stimuli: hence it is
not completely clear what dialect exactly has been investigated, and
what the parameters of variation are taken into account by the study.
Secondly, the method of analyzing adjective-noun couplets does not
work. The Indonesian subjects judge expressions with various
syntactic structures, because a single way for expressing syneasthesia
is felt as not appropriate in Indonesian language for all modality
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
137
pairings. It is apparent that dealing with different typologies of
languages rules out the possibility of working only with adjectival
phrases, confirming the validity of the approaches in which
synaesthesia is investigated in a wider range of grammatical
constructions.
Indonesia has been chosen as an instance of completely different
cultural and linguistic context from the ones considered so far: a
success of the directionality principle there would be a further
confirmation of its universal validity. As a base for their research, the
authors take a corpus of written texts collected from the internet.
However, this choice seems to contradict the yearning for otherness
they call for: in fact, internet texts (which involve possession or usage
of a computer, access to the net and aquaintance with a style of
communication according to its standards) are produced by people and
for people with an education and cultural background that can be
assimilated to the one of western culture. This may not influence the
language structure in itself, but surely affects communicative modality
towards a certain uniformity: consequently, some synaesthetic
expressions, even if coming from South East Asia, could be modelled
on western patterns.8
If, as we claim, a study on synaesthesia cannot be limited to a
narrow analysis of language structures, the context of expressions and
the macrocontext of the text is highly relevant. Therefore, can a
survey in a context such as the internet, however Indonesian, be truly
8 See the promotional text for a new line of make-up quoted in the article.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
138
considered conducted on a completely “exotic” material? We cast
doubt on this. As a result of this seminal experiment conducted on
acceptability of synaesthetic metaphors extracted by the internet
corpus, Shen and Gil find tendencies that seem to confirm the validity
of the directionality principle, “nevertheless, the results of the
experiment show considerable variation from one stimulus to another,
for which we do not expect to be able to come up with a single unified
explanation. Each word and each pair of words has its own story, its
own idiosyncratic features, which affect the way in which it is judged
by the experimental subjects” (Shen and Gil, 2008).
The authors admit that it is not so easy to reconduct all
synaesthetic expressions to a precise pattern: a discrepancy with the
standard of the directionality principle is in fact observed. The reason
for this is supposed to be linked with the degree of acceptability
shown by certain forms due to their higher or lower frequency.
Conventional and frequent expressions are said to be more consistent
with the expected pattern. The authors claim that having a sample of
synaesthesias more homogeneous as for frequency, hence for
acceptability, would have provided results more consistent with the
directionality principle. But it seems that there are not synaesthetic
expressions of the same frequency that can cover all the modality
pairings to be investigated. Therefore an optimal experimental
condition to demonstrate the validity of the directionality principle is
not to be given.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
139
If the tendency in experiments is to base them on homogeneous
stimuli to get homogeneous responses, what is the heuristic value of
such experiments? If the basis on which data are discarded is the non-
conformity to the hypothesis the data should test, what do experiments
really test? This question is particularly relevant because studies such
as Shen and Gil’s aim to find universal cognitive principles, valid
anywhere, any time: but it seems that in looking for this universality,
they rule out what they cannot account for, labelling it as
idiosyncratic. Such “idiosyncrasies”, as we have seen for Basque
semantic shift and Heaney’s poetry, are not included in the coverage
of the universal principle (thus, they implicity declare the non-
universality of the principle itself). They are just thrown on the scrap
heap and rarely used as starting point to broaden the horizon and
reformulate the principles, to adapt them to an account which may
contemplate the existence of such a heap.
To be honest, Shen and Gil in some way perceive the
inadequacy of data collected only by means of such experiments, so
they try to re-tool their analysis taking the everyday life experience
into account, with the specificity of Indonesian culture. Consequently,
they base a following analysis on a corpus of natural speech the MPI
Jakarta Child Language Corpus (JCLC).
This corpus should provide “a more faithful reflection of the
range of linguistic phenomena to which ordinary speakers of
Indonesian are exposed in the course of their everyday lives, and
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
140
which might, accordingly, impinge on their performance as
experimental subjects” (Shen and Gil, 2008).
After analysis, data from the JCLC show instances of
synaesthetic metaphors in line with the directionality principle, but
counterexamples as well. The most problematic case involves the
sense of taste. There are tokens, in fact, which report synaesthetic
expressions associating tastes and colours, overtly violating the
directionality principle. Data about taste were also the most diffcult to
reduce to directionality schema in experimental task. The question is
open: “frequency in naturalistic speech may be an additional factor
governing subjects’ judgments of naturalness in the experimental task.
However, this leaves unanswered the question of why, in both the
MPI Jakarta Child Language Corpus and the experimental study,
combinations of rasa [taste] and a colour term, as in stimulus 5 [type
sight-taste], form synaesthetic metaphors in violation of the
Directionality Principle. A possible answer to this question is provided
by Viberg (1984), who shows that the principles governing
synaesthetic metaphors are different for verbs than they are for other
parts of speech” (Shen and Gil, 2008).
The ways proposed to solve the problem are: investigating
frequency and precising which part of speech rasa exactly is. Both
ways may be fruitful, and may lead to satisfactory solutions.
Nevertheless, we suggest to include in the solving process a
further perspective, that is trying an evaluation of the Indonesian
sensotype. As Sean Day suggests in the paper Synaesthesia and
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
141
Synaesthetic Metaphors “linguistic aspects per se of metaphors are to
be chiefly found in the realm of semantics and necessitate a re-
analysis and re-working of the lexicon. However, the information and
models for this re-tooling are chiefly to be found outside of linguistics
proper. [. . . ] Rules for putting two or more items [.. . ] together in an
association are not universal [.. . ]. Rather, they vary radically from
culture to culture. Thus, in order to approach the investigation of
metaphors as a whole, we must first start out by breaking things up so
that we may look at their specific cultures and their distinct
organization and emerging rules for a particular set of metaphor. The
field of anthropology has already supplied us with a rich collection of
data” (Day, 1996).
5.2 Weyéwa and taste
The field of anthropology provides us with data on taste in the
Indonesian area. It has been seen that taste seems not to fit into the
directionality schema: could this be due to a particular role of taste in
the Indonesian culture and related sensotype? In trying to answer this
question we propose a reading of the article of Kuipers about
Weyéwa. This is not to say that Jakarta inhabitants are the same as
Weyéwa people, but just to put forward the idea that in the population
of the Indonesian area a different sensotype, if compared to a western
one, may be active, with a peculiar cultural hierarchy of senses and a
specific linguistic representation of them. The Weyéwa case is only an
example and further research should be carried out to ascertain the
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
142
major sensotypes active in Indonesia and their relationship with
language.
Weyéwa live in Sumba, about 250 miles East of Bali and this
island “has experienced relatively few externally imposed changes to
the traditional ways of life of its 400,000 or so inhabitants” (Kuipers,
1991, p. 113). Weyéwa still rely on their own gardens and livestock
for food: therefore, their traditional diet has undergone few changes
(and the most significant western elements in the daily food are coffee
and refined sugar) and, like diet, the social role of food and of the
sequence of tastes is still unchanged. As Kuipers reports, in fact, “In
any Weyéwa social encounter between same-sex age-mates that lasts
for more than a few seconds, small, shoulder-slung baskets of
ingredients for a betel and areca nut chew are obligatorily exchanged”
(Kuipers, 1991, p. 114).
The host who wants to honour his guest would provide him with
abundant good quality betel and areca nuts, which are kept in a basket,
with a semi-secret interior fold, called ndáppeta containing the best
choice fruits: the closer the relationship between guest and host, the
better the guest knows how to reach the ndáppeta inside the basket.
Betel and areca are usually enjoyed in the veranda of the house. The
following lines show how both taste of food and access to it have a
crucial social significance: “I heard the story of a presumptuous young
man who was badly rebuffed by the father of the girl he was courting
when, in a rather premature effort to establish his intimacy with the
family, he reached for the innermost fold of the elder man’s betel
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
143
basket and popped into his mouth what turned out to be some very
tough-tasting old maládi [a harsh variety of areca]. Since the ndáppeta
folds usually contain the choice ingredients, he soon realized the
hostile significance of this clearly intentional sign” (Kuipers, 1991, p.
115).
Betel and areca have a dominant tart and pungent taste: if the
encounter proceeds, it requires something sweet, like coconut juice or
heavily sugared hot coffee. If the guest stays longer for a meal, the
food is served into the house after the coffee or the coconut. Starch
staples constitute the core of the meal and they are served
accompanied by a number of condiments and small bowls of salt and
crushed chilis. At this stage, saltiness and pungent tastes are the most
prominent, but if the meal becomes special or formal, more sweet
sauces are served. However, even if sweet, flavours are intense,
because mildness and blandness are always considered negatively, as
a signal of scarce respect for the guest or as an evidence of poverty of
the host.9
When describing Weyéwa food and taste sequence, the matter
gets highly complex. In fact, tastes are labelled by “narrowly defined,
non-lexemic, object-bound terms”: Kuipers reports that his assistants
were not able to place the flavour of mint within any particular
category, and the sensation was described with something that, if
translated, sounds as “it has the taste of the mint plant” (Kuipers,
1991, p. 118). Some terms can be used in association only with
9 Blandness is only appreciated in a mouth-rinsing water which may be provided before and after the meal.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
144
specific kinds of foods, and Kuipers is surprised to hear from recorded
conversations “how rare it was for a taste word to be used without
some kind of intensifier” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 120). Moreover, terms
which can be grouped in the field of taste words sometimes refer to
complex sensations involving not only flavour, but also temperature,
texture, smell of the food, hence describing a combination of
multimodal experiences. Further, a peculiarity of taste words in
Weyéwa is to bear a situational markedness: in fact, during a social
visit, food evaluation is at issue, but loud comments or description of
it are not allowed. Discussing the taste qualities of food is impolite
and it may be offensive for the host: if it is done, it causes heavy
social implications. Comments on food are appropriate only later on,
“out of the earshot of the host” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 121), in situations
when taste is not at issue as a direct component of the interaction.
From this context, it emerges that an evaluation of the linguistic
phenomenology of taste cannot be only confined to an analysis of
portions of sentences. Situational context is relevant too (see the sort
of ban on food-talking while eating) and peculiar patterns of use (e.g.
association with intensifiers) cannot be discarded in accounting for the
expression of taste quality. Before attempting a study of taste
associated with other domains, then, taste itself has to be investigated
deeply. It seems particularly inappropriate not to consider the
culturally defined taste categories shared by the community. As a
proposal for further metodological investigation, Kuipers concludes
the report on Weyéwa noticing that “it remains an interesting
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
145
comparative question to what degree pure, abstracted context-free
referential relations characterize linguistic representations of sensory
experience” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 125).
Synaesthesia is an example of linguistic representation of
sensory experience: in investigating it, context (both textual and
situational) cannot be neglected. It may pique interest that most
difficulties in the linguistic analysis in Indonesian show up when the
domain of taste is investigated: perhaps this is linked to a peculiar
conception of the taste in the Indonesian area, of which an example is
provided by the Weyéwa people. The role of taste in this traditional
community in Indonesia reminds us of the existence of sensotypes: it
may be fruitful to root in the specific cultural relationship among
senses the evaluation of the relationship among sense words.
6. A glance at neurology
Suggestions confirming the absence of a predetermined pattern
in combining sensory perceptions come from neurology too. The
environment normally generates stimuli which elicit a simultaneous
response in more than one modality: a food can be seen, touched,
smelt and tasted at the same time, a lowering of temperature may be
paired with a change in sunlight, or with the sound of a sudden wind,
and so on with coupling and grouping of perceptions. A line of
research in the combination and integration of modalities is being
carried out in the Max Planck Institute of Tübingen, Germany, by
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
146
Marc O. Ernst and his group (Ernst and Bülthoff, 2004). The main
tenet of the theory underlying their work is that information gained
through perception is integrated with prior knowledge to allow an
action on the environment. The percept is constituted by the merging
of multiple modality sources: the integration of the signals is operated
according to a strategy elaborated for the situation. The account of
perception is given in probabilistic terms: that is to say, our brain
cannot produce but subsequent hypotheses on the tridimensional
environment, collecting information from all the available sources and
picking out the most likely estimate of what is going on. An example
is the phenomenon that can be experienced travelling by train. We are
sitting on the train, stopped at the station, and we are looking out of
the window. From our point of view we cannot see anything but
another train, standing on the track immediately beside us. Suddenly
that train starts moving. Or maybe not? “In either case the brain will
come up with a unique ‘right or wrong’ answer to this ambiguous
situation. If the brain is wrong the illusory self-motion is noticed
either when looking out of another window or when a different
sensory modality such as the vestibular system disambiguates the
situation. That is, the brain collects more and more information about
the perceptual event and finally resolves the ambiguity” (Ernst and
Bülthoff, 2004, p. 162). The senses cooperate to disambiguate
perceptions and to get the most reliable estimate on the state of the
environment. For example, an object can be recognized both visually
and haptically: being the viewpoint usually frontal to the object, vision
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
147
provides the map for the visible side of an object, while touch (given
that hands can reach the back of the object) produces the map for the
other side of it and for features not detectable by vision (e.g.
temperature and texture), integrating the information about the object
(Newell et al., 2001). The model used by Ernst’s group considers that
for specific goals there can be modalities more appropriate and precise
to rely on. A recent experimental study by this group (Bresciani et al.,
2006) reports interesting findings on the integration of perceptions of
visual and tactile events. The experiments consist in various sessions,
when visual and tactile stimuli are presented to the subjects. The task
for the subjects is to count the received stimuli, either a flashing light
or a tap on the arm. The experimental situation is the somministration
of the combined stimuli, to calculate the relative reliability of each
sense depending on the task requested: in fact, in the case of
simultaneous presentation of combined stimuli, subjects are instructed
to react only to the flashes in a trial, and only to the tap on the arm in a
second trial. Consequently, each one of the two senses is in turn
receptor of a background or of a foreground stimulus. Subjects must
push a key on a keypad when they detect the task-relevant stimulus.
When combined, the stimuli are presented in equal number or with
discrepancy (one more or one less stimulus in the background
modality) to allow the measuring of influence of the backgrounded
sense in the response to the detection of stimuli. Results show that
signals are always combined, being the perceived number of flashes
(or taps) systematically increased or decreased when more or less taps
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
148
(or flashes) were presented (Bresciani et al., 2006, p. 559). This is
considered to be an automatic combination operated by the central
nervous system, which tends to combine signals considered to
originate from the same physical event (taps and flashes occurring
almost always together), integrating multimodal signals.10
10 What we call ‘optical’ or ‘acoustic’ illusions, such as the so called McGurk effect (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976), are operations by which our CNS integrates inputs to arrange a naturally plausible perception. We cannot forget that our biological machine evolved in a natural environment, providing us with effective means to understand the world and survive. When our prehistoric ancestors inhabited the world, a voice from a face always comes from that face, not from a sound track matched with an inconsistent video image.
The two
modalities influence one another, following a principle of consistency:
focusing on a modality increases the attention towards a type of
stimuli, but it does not obliterate the response of the other. The
reliability of each sense is increased or diminished according to the
task to be performed: the foregrounding or the backgrounding of the
modality is due to task instruction. Neither of the two modalities show
hierarchical predominance or higher accuracy and distinctiveness. The
intention of accomplishing a task, the attention as obedience to a
command, all of these shaped the behavior of the subject. In a lab, we
would say, not only a subministration of stimuli has been recreated,
but a social environment of dominance and accomplishment, as well
as cooperation between subjects and experimenter, rules of behavior
to learn, and the use of language to transmit all of this. In a nutshell,
this is what happens to people when they grow up in the social
environment surrounding them, which makes them learn a specific
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
149
language, shows patterns of behavior, assigns them a role and a belief
on what they are supposed to do, stimulates their interest toward some
perceptions suggesting how to shift between modalities to better
attend a complex stimulus. All of these factors result in particular
outcomes of perceptual activity and relationships between senses that
are peculiar to each culture, which are partly mirrored by language.
At the same time, as in the experiments shown, the
backgrounded modalities do have a role in perception: if stimulated,
they cannot be totally obliterated by the instructions provided, or by
the more frequent experiences the subject takes part in. Out of the lab,
this means that even if a particular perceptual pattern and a
relationship between modalities seem more broadly diffused and more
easily detectable, other patterns and relationships are not completely
absent.
Other studies on neural structures underlying perception
(Barsalou, 2008; Pietrini et al., 2004; Ricciardi et al., 2009) show that
experience, possible actions and learning, all of them act as modifiers
of neural pattern activations. Human environment is not only the
physical world, but the cultural one as well, with all the assumptions,
beliefs and attitudes it brings towards reality, in large part conveyed
through language.
“What we call ‘direct physical experience’ is never merely a
matter of having a body of a certain sort: rather, every experience
takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions. It
can be misleading, therefore, to speak of direct physical experience
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
150
which we then ‘interpret’ in terms of our conceptual system. Cultural
assumptions, values and attitudes are not a conceptual overlay which
we may or may not place upon experience as we choose. It would be
more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through,
that we experience our ‘world’ in such a way that our culture is
already present in the very experience itself” (Lakoff and Johnson,
2003, p. 57).
7. Concluding remarks
The study of linguistic synaesthesia is a valuable approach in
clarifying the relationship among the different sensory modalities.
Studies focused on precise features of synaesthesia, such as recurrent
combinations of the sensory modalities and comprehensibility of
expressions, have correctly pointed out a regularity in the construction
and interpretation of synaesthetic expressions in many languages.
However, their analysis crosses out the context and reduces the
analysis of synaesthetic expressions to adjective-noun couplets:
therefore only a partial evaluation of the phenomenon is given. Other
syntactical options to express synaesthesia are discarded, and the
contribution to the meaning of the expression given by the context is
disregarded.
Nevertheless, the studies extend in a universal perspective their
findings, proposing that the directionality and the preferred patterns
they have identified in synaesthesia are a reflection of cognitive
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
151
constraints. They make the directionality of synaesthesia overlap with
the directionality of metaphor, henceforth claiming for it the same
universality attributed to the metaphor principles. Moreover, because
the findings they came up with involve sensory perception, they
implicitly postulate a cognitive hierarchy of senses which mirrors the
relations found in language. The crucial controversial point is
precisely here: such a directionality and hierarchy could not be
universally tenable. In fact, there are counterexamples to this
directionality and hierarchy. These are found in various languages,
and in various types of syntactic constructions. This means that the
studies which claim a universality for a sensory hierarchy have failed
to investigate linguistic expressions and contexts which demonstrate a
more elastic connection between different sensory modalities.
However, the studies which admit a more free pattern do not claim a
total indeterminacy of the directionality: in fact, grounding their
observations in the cognitive account of metaphor, they keep intact the
postulate of the mapping from a more salient source to a less salient
target, and allow variability only at the level of the choice of the
source and target modalities.
Apparently, this approach is more in accord with findings in
other disciplines, such as neurology and anthropology. As for
neurology, there are documented influences of experience in shaping
the brain circuitry and the organization of the systems deputed to the
comprehension and interpretation of sensory inputs (Ernst and
Bülthoff, 2004; Maravita and Iriki, 2004; Recanzone, 1999; Ricciardi
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
152
et al., 2009; Sirois et al., 2008). Anthropology has found that the
senses are considered in the various societies with peculiar hierarchies
of values and they are variously trained according to the necessities
which that society believes to be primary (Howes, 1991; Goody, 2002;
Gusman, 2004; Matera, 2002; Ritchie, 1991). Therefore the
organizations of the sensorium is the most disparate across societies.
As a result of this, expressions and structures mirroring the
particular sensotype of a society can be found in language. Even if
there may be correspondences of the hierarchy of the sensorium in
different societies, therefore in different languages, this does not mean
that a single hierarchy must be shared across the entire human
community.11
In conclusion, an answer to the question of the beginning
emerges. Yes, a hierarchy of senses does make sense, but other
hierarchies of senses make sense too. The point is that a unique
hierarchy active in all human communities does not exist but each
community shares a hierarchy of senses and a way of dealing with
perceptions adequate to its necessities. At the same time all persons in
the community foreground or background their attention to the single
modalities according to the special task they have to accomplish and
to the sensotype they have learnt to be most effective. It follows that
11 Particularly, the existence of different sensotypes active in different societies risks to bias the premises and the interpretation of the results of studies on perception. In fact researchers themselves bear a specific organization of sensorium which may lead them to design and administer tests which focus on some sensory modalities more than on others for reasons not due to the necessity of the study but to the hierarchy of senses which the researchers are trained to work.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
153
the investigation of sensory hierarchies as they emerge from language
is interesting and necessary to be pursued, because it can reveal much
of how perception is construed and communicated. However,
linguistics alone is not enough to investigate the reasons for the
creation of a sensorial hierarchy and the reasons for the patterns of
variation of hierarchies. Therefore, findings in linguistics in the field
of perception must be related and supported by parallel findings in
neurology and anthropology, if a complete understanding of the matter
is to be pursued.
Sara Ricci
References
Roberto Ajello. I colori nella cultura dei Gizey (n-e Camerun): categorie linguistiche e forme sociali. In Massimo Squillacciotti, editor, Sguardi sui colori: Arti, comunicazione, linguaggi, pages 153-162. Protagon, Siena, 2007.
Laurence W. Barsalou. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59:617-645, May 2008.
Jean-Pierre Bresciani, Franziska Dammeier, and Marc O.Ernst. Vision and touch are automatically integrated for the perception of sequences of events. Journal of Vision, 6:554-564, 2006.
Carmen Maria Bretones Callejas. Synaesthetic metaphors in English. University of California at Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, 2001.
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
154
Keith Brown and Anne Anderson, editors. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier, Boston, 2006.
Cristina Cacciari. Crossing the senses in metaphorical language. In Raymond W. Gibbs, editor, The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, pages 425-443. CUP, New York, 2008.
Maria Catricalà. Fenomenologie sinestetiche tra retorica e pragmatica. Studi e Saggi Linguistici, (XLVI):7-92, 2008.
Sean Day. Synaesthesia and synaesthetic metaphors. Psyche (http://journalpsyche.org), 2(32), July 1996.
Stephen de Ullmann. Romanticism and synaesthesia: a comparative study of the sense transfer in Keats and Byron. PMLA, 60(3):881-827, September 1945.
Marc O. Ernst and Heinrich H. Bülthoff. Merging the senses into a robust percept. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8(4):162-169, April 2004.
Jack Goody. The anthropology of the senses and sensations. La Ricerca Folklorica, (45):17-28, Aprile 2002.
Maria Grossmann. Colori e lessico: Studi sulla struttura semantica degli aggettivi di colore in catalano, castigliano, italiano, romeno, latino ed ungherese. Narr, Tübingen, 1988.
Alessandro Gusman. Antropologia dell’olfatto. Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2004.
David Howes. Sensorial anthropology. In David Howes, editor, The Varieties of Sensory Experience: a Sourcebook in Anthropology of the Senses, pages 167-190. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.
B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano. Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a cross-linguistic study, 1999. Ph. D. thesis, University of
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
155
Edinburgh.
Joel C. Kuipers. Matters of taste in Weyéwa. In David Howes, editor, The varieties of sensory experience: a sourcebook in anthropology of the senses, pages 111-127. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.
Shigehisa Kuriyama. The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine. Zone Books, New York, 2002.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors we live by – with a new after-work. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003.
Colin M. MacLeod. Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review. Psychological Bulletin, 109(2):163-203, 1991.
Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki. Tools for the body (schema). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(2):79-86, February 2004.
Vincenzo Matera. Antropologia dei sensi: Osservazioni introduttive. La Ricerca Folklorica, (45):7-16, Aprile 2002.
Harry McGurk and John MacDonald. Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264:746-748, December 1976.
Holger Mitterer, Jörn M.Horschig, et al. The influence of memory on perception: It’s not what things look like, it’s what you call them. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(6):1557-1562, November 2009.
Fiona N. Newell, Marc O. Ernst, et al. Viewpoint dependence in visual and haptic object recognition. Psychological Science, 12(1):37-42, January 2001.
Walter J. Ong. The shifting sensorium. In David Howes, editor, The
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
156
varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in anthropology of the senses, pages 25-30. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.
Pietro Pietrini, Maura L. Furey, et al. Beyond sensory images: Object-based representation in the human ventral pathway. PNAS, 101(15):5658-5663, April 2004.
V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard. Psychophysical investigations into the neural basis of synaesthesia. Proc. of The Royal Society of London, 268:979-983, 2001a.
V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard. Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12): 3-34, 2001b.
Gregg H. Recanzone. Cerebral cortical plasticity: Perception and skill acquisition. In Michael G. Gazzaniga, editor, The new cognitive neuroscience (second edition), pages 237-247. MIT press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Emiliano Ricciardi, Daniela Bonino, et al. Do we really need vision?
How blind people “see” the actions of others. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (31):9719-9724, 2009.
Ian Ritchie. Fusion of the faculties: A study of the language of the
senses in Hausaland. In David Howes, editor, The varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in anthropology of the senses, pages 192-202. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.
Yeshayahu Shen. Cognitive constraint on poetic figures. Cognitive
Linguistics, 1(8):33-71, 1997. Yeshayahu Shen and Ravid Aisenman. ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but
those unheard are sweeter’: synaesthetic metaphors and cognition. Language and Literature, 2(17):107-121, 2008.
Yeshayahu Shen and David Gil. Sweet fragrances from Indonesia: A
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa
www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo
157
universal principle governing directionality in synaesthetic metaphors. In Jan Auracher and Willie van Peer, editors, New beginnings in literary studies, pages 49-71. Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008.
Sylvain Sirois, Michael Spratling, et al. Précis of neuroconstructivism:
How the brain constructs cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (31):321-356, 2008.
Ridley J. Stroop. Studies of interferences in serial verbal reactions.
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18:643-662, 1935. Stephen Ullmann. The principles of semantics. Jackson, Glasgow,
1951. Francisco Villar. Gli Indoeuropei e le lingue d’Europa. Il Mulino, Bologna, 1997.
Joseph M. Williams. Synaesthetic adjectives: a possible law of
semantic change. Language, 52(2):461-478, 1976. Mallory Wober. The sensotype hypothesis. In David Howes, editor,
The varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in anthropology of the senses, pages 31-42. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.