Dissertationsstipendium: Julia Salzinger – Smell – the muted sense. Variation and metaphoricity in olfactory language

Since we gather information about our surrounding mostly through the senses, it is natural that we also talk about sense perceptions. The vocabulary for each sense differs significantly; while we have a large visual vocabulary, olfaction is hardly lexicalized. In general, we use adjectives to describe objects, experiences and also sense perceptions in more detail, but since there are hardly any olfactory adjectives, speakers fall back on adjectives from other (sensory) domains. Some of these adjectives from the other senses are used literally, some metaphorically or metonymically, which means that some simply combine and describe two sense perceptions that happen at the same time, while others add an imagined, associated, or evaluative second sense perception that does not co-occur physically. The analysis of ADJ+smell occurrences is based on COCA, the largest corpus of contemporary American English with 1 billion tokens of text, because that will allow a thorough analysis of occurrences across different genres. All instances of attributive adjectives with a frequency higher than five that co-occur directly with the noun smell are extracted and analyzed. The aim of this study is to get a better understanding of the co-occurring adjectives of the noun smell to see how we talk about this muted sense. A special focus will be placed on sensory adjectives to investigate whether those co-occurrences can all be classified as synesthetic metaphors or if they are cases of metonymy or even literal instances.