Volume — 2007 (15 entries)

The entries in this section all focus on the language of perception. The first entry “Language of Perception: The view from language and culture” provides an overview of linguistic and… More →

This entry provides an overview of some linguistic phenomena pertinent to the “language of perception”, and is a necessary companion to the elicitation tasks later in the field manual. The… More →

The task is designed to elicit vocabulary for colour using a subset of the Munsell chips from the World Colour Survey. The primary goal is to establish how people talk… More →

We are interested to find how, and to what extent, your language makes shape distinctions. This area of visual experience is in principle “effable” in the sense that a child… More →

This task explores natural, non-expert, metalanguage for sounds in the language under study. In English, for example, sound metalanguage is quite rich. We talk about unpleasant sounds as noise (in… More →

Newborn infants learn about the world around them through touch. Piaget famously noted the importance of manual and oral exploration of objects for developing spatial cognition and knowledge of the… More →

What resources do languages have for describing smells? Is there dedicated vocabulary for encoding olfaction, and if so what are the types of distinctions that are encoded? And, finally, how… More →

The underlying physiology of taste is far better understood than that of smell. There are five types of receptor, namely for sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (glutamic acid). In… More →

Emotion has been a core domain for investigating the relative roles of biology and culture in human cognition. The goal is to investigate cross-cultural emotional categories in language and thought.… More →

Expressives are a distinct class of words which denote sensory perceptions of the speaker; describing visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, haptic, emotional or other types of perceptions in relation to particular… More →