Tastes We Live By

Honorary editor: René Dirven

The series Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (ACL) welcomes book proposals from any domain where the theoretical insights developed in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) have been (or could be) fruitfully applied. In the past thirty-five years, the CL movement has articulated a rich and satisfying view of language around a small number of foundational principles. The first one argues that language faculties do not constitute a separate module of cognition, but emerge as specialized uses of more general cognitive abilities. The second principle emphasises the symbolic function of language. The grammar of individual languages (including the lexicon, morphology, and syntax) can be exclusively described as a structured inventory of conventionalized symbolic units. The third principle states that meaning is equated with conceptualization. It is subjective, anthropomorphic, and crucially incorporates humans' experience with their bodies and the world around them. Finally, CL's Usage-Based conception anchors the meaning of linguistic expressions in the rich soil of their social usage. Consequently, usage-related issues such as frequency and entrenchment contribute to their semantic import. Taken together, these principles provide researchers in different academic fields with a powerful theoretical framework for the investigation of linguistic issues in the specific context of their particular disciplines. The primary focus of ACL is to serve as a high level forum for the result of these investigations.

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Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds. In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience index of gustatory terms in both American and British English. The second part of the book is an overview of the metaphorical extensions that motivate the polysemy of Taste terms, with the aid of corpus analysis methods and various texts. This book is the first to review systematically and in a usage-based perspective the role of the sensory domain of Taste in English, showing a more complicated picture and suggesting that its under-representation and difficulty of encoding does not correspond to lack of importance.