Taste and sight: A corpus analysis of English adjective-noun constructions

Embodiment is central to the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis. We receive the information of the world around us through the bodily sensations; i.e. we perceive, then process and conceptualize it. Research into the sensory domains has continued to elicit further examination of how we use metaphoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Investigation has been carried out both on the single sense domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. Linguistic transfer between various senses seems to respect a hierarchy from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hearing and sight), even though some variation of this hierarchy has been noted. The present study is the first part of a two-fold analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of taste and sight. The objective is to verify what collocations occur between the two domains: do they respect the hierarchy, and how frequent, or how strong are they? Corpus analysis of the construction of the adjective + noun type are in keeping with existing literature: the sensory domain that functions as source is understood as an adjective modifying another sensory domain, which is found in the form of a noun. This research concentrates on cross-modal pairs found through a corpus-based analysis of taste adjectives in the description of vision nouns, e.g. delicious colors. Linguistic data were retrieved from corpora that allow for comparison of the actual usage and definition of these constructions. These include the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of English. The experimental methodology is in keeping with the usage-based approach of Cognitive Linguistics, considering frequency and relevance.