Conveying Flavor Images and Imagery

The investigation of flavor is as intricate a task in linguistics as it is in science. Besides its complicity in human linguistic expression, as illustrated in the previous section, the image driven by the gustatory imagery evoked by flavor experiences can be the bridge linking perception and language. As McBurney (1986) indicated that flavor is an individual impression (i.e., the smell and taste components are united in producing a flavor without losing their separate identities and qualities), from an analytic perspective, gustatory imagery thus allows linguistic expression to be both descriptive in conveying distinctive perceptions, and metaphoric in evoking associative images.

“If we want to determinate and name the quality of a smell, we often use terms derived from other sensory systems. Many words for smells belong as well to taste, to touch, to hearing or to sight. Adjectives directly connected to the perception of a smell are generally derived from the associated nouns (odor, stink, smell, whiff). There aren’t very many such words: stuffy, overwhelming, stinking, rotting, penetrating, pungent, fragrant, perfumed, volatile…Does our limited verbal expressiveness in this area have a purely biological or neurophysiological background or is there more involved?”

— Vroon, Pieter Adrianus, Van Amerongen, Anton, and De Vries (1997)

First, linguistic expressions are viewed as either simplified (Auvray & Spence, 2008) or

“deodorized” (Vroon et al., 1997) in psychology. Since there are no primary and sufficiently distinctive qualities from which the olfactory or gustatory experience can be classified into compounds or components (Gibson, 1966), odors are always the names of objects or classes of events, according to Auvray and Spence (2008). Furthermore, Vroon et al. (1997) noted

regarded as “deodorized” because it tended to be intertwined with other perceptions.

On the contrary, the perceiver is able to access an impression associated with his or her experiences derived from a sensation or a pure percept during tasting. Instead of attending to the source object, one can attend to the subjective experience itself. Objects are not detected merely by sensations; subjective memory and object specification are operated by the joint extraction of stimulus information when smelling and tasting (Gibson, 1966). Likewise, the philosopher Henri Bergson stated the following in “Matter and Memory”:

“[T]here is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.”

— Henri Bergson (1913)

This notion is echoed in what scientists call the “Proust effect.” The smell and taste of tea and madeleines provoked Proust’s recollection of past events, which he recorded in one of his most famous stream-of-consciousness literary works. As noted in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2011), smell or scent, in this sense, has been considered as the memory sense, as it is most likely to stimulate reminiscence. Proust referred to the memories evoked as involuntary. In spite of all of the descriptions of Proust’s smell memories, even if sensory experience is not considered as the domain of analysis and abstract thought, it would remain a traditionally physiological response shaped by partly psychology and partly personal history. It is believed nowadays that perceptions can serve as a mnemonic device or trigger a memory, neither of which is an uncommon experience (Willander & Larsson, 2007).

Therefore, it is not only physiologically evidential, but socially meaningful when perceptions are communicated with people, especially in a linguistic form such as in discourse or

literature. However, the connection of perception with cultures and the humanities, as stated by Howes below, was not viewed with importance until the end of the twentieth century, when the “sensory revolution” declared the study of perceptions to be relevant for the humanities.

“[The senses become] the most fundamental domain of cultural expression, the medium through which all the values and practices of society are enacted.”

— Howes (2003)

In linguistics research, in accordance with the quote from Howes (2003), metaphorical strategies for interpreting sensory experiences are the instinctive devices for mediating human thoughts and primitive perceptions. Marks (1996) proposed that perceptual metaphor is a crucial metaphorical expression; it concerns how language plays a role in perception. As a metaphor mainly focused on perceptual experiences and expressions, perceptual metaphor involves the concepts of perception (from the senses such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste) as the target concepts, and an asymmetrical relation of metaphoric expression (Marks, 1996).

Discussing the variations of metaphor, Kövecses (2010) asserted that human minds and cultures have major roles in generating metaphors and reconstructing the way people see the world. Extracting source domains from a large number of potential candidates, people select the ones that “make intuitive sense” (Kövecses, 2010), namely, those from human experiences, and match them with the target domains. In addition, in contrast to the traditional view of metaphor as simply a rhetoric strategy, the view provided by the Lakoffian-Johnsonian model (2003), that is, the ICM, holds conceptual metaphor to be a crucial

However, conceptual metaphors are not exempt from the identification, organization, and explanation of linguistic representations in contextual contents while providing heuristic information in flavor expressions (Caballero & Suárez-Toste, 2010). For instance, in wine discourse, metaphors such as WINES ARE HUMAN BEINGS and WINES ARE TEXTILES are used due to personal preferences or verbosity. Thus, an unclear identification is derived from “(i) the close relationship between the source domains in some metaphors (e.g. architecture and anatomy), (ii) the co-evocation of various metaphors by a single expression, and (iii) the fuzzy boundaries between conceptual and synesthetic metaphor (as these types have been defined in the cognitive literature)” (Caballero & Suárez-Toste, 2010). In other words, although a metaphor offers a solution to these difficulties by providing wine tasting notes with conceptual frames and corresponding lexicons, several problems arise such as a lack of systematic approaches in creatively expanding such entrenched schemas.

Last but not least, as human tasting systems are biologically obligated to be “gatekeepers”

to identify harmful items from harmless ones for survival, flavor experiences are connected to emotional reactions and memories. In other words, to identify the good and bad things that may affect human bodies, the functions of smell and taste are aided by several components

“associated with a past place or event which can trigger memories, and in turn may create emotional reactions” (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2010). Therefore, when it comes to conveying flavor experiences under a certain cultural context, a vivid image description is utilized not only for specifying the sensory feeling, but also for “demanding a great deal of knowledge and experience on behalf of the readers” (Paradis & Eeg-Olofsson, 2013). In addition, even if conceptual metaphors are utilized, the ineffability of linguistic codability in depicting flavor (Levinson & Majid, 2014) remains. Connecting crossmodal perception with linguistic

imagery requires the use of precise explanations found within other cognitive linguistic theories.

Notably, as proven in previous literature, similes, which are capable of conveying an abundance of imaginative, dynamic, and vivid information using gustatory imagery, are in fact expressed the most during flavor experiences (Caballero & Suárez-Toste, 2010; Paradis

& Eeg-Olofsson, 2013). Croijmans and Majid (2016) mentioned that source-based terms are recorded as being applied more frequently by flavor experts, whereas novices use more evaluative words (e.g., “nice”). Similes can be considered as ad hoc descriptions used because of a lack of direct linguistic indication. Unfortunately, similes have been seen as extending beyond the boundary of metaphorical expressions, rendering them too cryptic and intractable for analysis. In order to thoroughly comprehend the crossmodal expressions of flavor in Taiwan Mandarin, the present study endeavors to take on the crucial task of understanding similes in relation to crossmodality.