The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity(131 Typological Studies in Language)

This volume presents novel cross-linguistic insights into how olfactory experiences are expressed in typologically (un-)related languages both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic and fourteen chapters based on philological investigation and thorough fieldwork data from Basque, Beja, Fon, Formosan languages, Hebrew, Indo-European languages, Japanese, Kartvelian languages, Purepecha, and languages of northern Vanuatu. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve, inter alia, lexical olfactory repertoires and naming strategies, non-literal meanings of olfactory expressions and their semantic change, reduplication, colexification, mimetics, and language contact. The findings provide the reader with a range of fascinating facts about perception description, contribute to a deeper understanding of how olfaction as an understudied sense is encoded linguistically, and offer new theoretical perspectives on how some parts of our cognitive system are verbalized cross-culturally. This volume is highly relevant to lexical typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anthropologists.

Review :
The Linguistics of Olfaction can be seen as a benchmark in the exploration of olfactory language, and thus of olfaction itself, an often downplayed sensory modality that is deeply connected with our cognitive activities (Holley 1999: 180–181), emotions (Soundry et al. 2011), and memories (Strauch et al. 2019). Consequently, it contributes to the expanding field of sensory linguistics (cf. Winter 2019) and to a deeper understanding of how we perceive and make sense of the world around us. The Linguistics of Olfaction will be of interest to a wide audience both within linguistics and beyond. Naturally, (lexico-grammatical) typologists have the most to gain from this book, but there is also ample content relevant for linguists interested in metaphor, ideophones, cognitive linguistics, evidentiality, lexicology, and language change. I also recommend this volume to any anthropologists, historians and cognitive scientists who have an interest in human olfaction and would like to know how smells are encoded across languages, and how this may change (or not change) over time. This book can be recommended for those researching the many domains in which typological generalizations are being discovered, providing as it does numerous references to work on other sense modalities. Its overall theoretical agnosticism, and the sheer lack of barriers to entry in such a novel area of study, make it well approachable for those at the student level, such that it could provide some of the readings for a seminar on cultural or psycholinguistics, typology, and so forth. In fact its many pointers to needed further research might inspire many honors- and graduate-level research projects.