Abstract
The sense of taste has been classified in the lower ranks of perception by most Western philosophers since the very beginning of the philosophical tradition in Ancient Greece. One of the reasons for this undervaluation is its instinctual and intimate nature. Furthermore, the vocabulary of taste does not seem to be as variegated and rich as that pertaining to other senses. The present paper aims at exploring the domain of taste descriptors in English by unravelling the family resemblances that structure the conceptual category. The free-sorting task is the experimental procedure that I adopted to investigate this domain, in keeping with a usage-based approach in a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. Firstly, I collected a list of potential taste-descriptors by searching for synonyms of the five basic English taste terms (i.e. sweet, bitter, sour, salty, umami) and two general taste terms (i.e. yummy, yucky). Secondly, I conducted a pre-test in which a pool of native speakers was asked to evaluate those lexemes, by simply saying whether they could be used to describe a taste or not. Lastly, I carried out a sorting task in which native speakers were asked to group the terms in any number of categories. Participants were then asked to name each category by choosing one of the members, thus priming the formation of a metonymic model, in keeping with Lakoff (1987). Results of the analyses suggest patterns of categorization among the different participants in the test, and show asymmetries in the strength of the association among members, i.e. some of the items in the domain collocate more frequently with other items. I conducted the analyses with the software GraphColl, which enables a visual representation of the collocation patterns, thus allowing an immediate interpretation of the data.
I would like to thank the Spring 15 students, staff and faculty at the Umbra Institute in Perugia (Italy) for volunteering as informants in the tests—you know who you are. I would also like to thank Prof. Michael O’Mahony for having shared his papers and thoughts with me during the preparation of this paper. Finally, this research has greatly benefited from Jodi L. Sandford’s guidance: her helpful input on the collocation procedure and consistent conversations on the methodology and analysis have been crucial to the development of the paper.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the criteria proposed, the taste sensation should: (1) have ecological consequence, (2) be elicited by a distinctive class of chemicals, (3) stem from activation of specialised receptors, (4) be detected through gustatory nerves and be processed in taste centres, (5) have a quality non-overlapping with other primary qualities, and (6) evoke a behavioural and/or physiological response.
- 2.
He considers various types of games (ball games, board games, Olympic games, etc.) and tries to identify common features to them all. In his own words: “Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’”-but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that” (1953: § 66, p 31e).
- 3.
The software is available online at www.extremetomato.com/projects/graphcoll.
- 4.
The superordinate status of the two terms warrants further discussion. The item seasoned appears in the 14th century with the meaning of “flavoured, spiced” (OED); the term flavourful is the last one of a series of adjectives deriving from the root flavor (cf. flavoursome, flavoury, flavorous), and appears in the 20th century. In this paper, I treated the two items as creating a cluster in the family resemblances section.
- 5.
dictionary.com.
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Bagli, M. (2018). Defining Taste in English Informant Categorization. In: Baicchi, A., Digonnet, R., Sandford, J. (eds) Sensory Perceptions in Language, Embodiment and Epistemology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91277-6_9
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