1 research outputs found
Odors, words and objects
The paper focuses on concepts and words referring to odors and to
objects that have an odor. We argue that odors are an interesting object of study since
they are evanescent, and since odor words do not refer to concrete and manipulable
objects, but to scents evoked by objects. A second reason why odors are interesting is
that some languages, as the Western ones, lack a specific odor lexicon, comparable in
richness and variety to the color lexicon, and that performance on odors naming is
typically worse than performance in color naming. In this work we discuss three
main issues. First, we illustrate literature showing that,
even if odor words do not
have concrete referents, many languages encode them quite easily: the case of odors
suggests that word meaning cannot be exhausted by the relationship with a referent,
and highlights the importance of the social sharing of meaning. Second, we have
discussed the peculiar status of odor concepts and words. Given their ambiguous
status, their simple existence poses problems both to theories according to which
concrete and abstract concepts do not differ, and to theories according to which they
represent a dichotomy.
Finally, we present an experiment in which we show that
names of objects evoke their smell, and that these smells evoke approach and
avoidance movements, in line with theories according to which words are grounded
in both sensorial and motor systems