How senses work

Contents

1 Introduction 4

2 Synaesthesia: a stepping stone to perception 10

2.1 Synaesthesia as a gure of speech . . . 10

2.1.1 Theoretical clarications . . . 10

2.1.2 A hierarchy of senses: does it make sense? . . . 13

2.1.3 In the mainstream: ndings in poetry and everyday language . . . 18

2.1.4 Out of the mainstream . . . 26

3 How senses work 36 3.1 Nervous system and impulse transmission . . . 36

3.1.1 The brain . . . 38

3.1.2 Cortical activity . . . 38

3.2 The senses . . . 39

3.2.1 Smell . . . 41

3.2.2 Taste . . . 43

3.2.3 Hearing . . . 44

3.2.4 Touch . . . 47

3.2.5 Sight . . . 48

3.3 The senses in the brain . . . 50

3.3.1 Plasticity . . . 53

3.3.2 The senses merge in perception . . . 54

3.3.3 The senses and the mirror system . . . 56

4 Other perspectives on how senses work 64 4.1 The sensotype hypothesis . . . 64

4.2 Can a word be coloured? . . . 70

4.3 Synaesthesia and sensotype: a matter of taste . . . 73

4.3.1 Sweet fragrance from Indonesia . . . 74

4.3.2 Weyéwa and taste . . . 78

5 A lesson on senses that comes from the East 81 5.1 Feeling the mo . . . 82 5.2 Understanding the pulse . . . 86 5.3 To sum up . . . 89

6 Conclusion 92

7 Appendix: Synaesthesia from the neurological point of view 95

References 99

List of Figures

2.1 Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities according to Williams . . . 16 2.2 Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities in Heaney's

poetry . . . 29 4.1 The Rod and the Frame Test . . . 68 4.2 Witkin's Embedded Figures Test . . . 69 7.1 Top-down inuences in synaesthesia: a 5 made up of 3s . . . . 96

Chapter 1

Introduction

A hierarchy of senses: does it make sense? This question arose from a book I stumbled on in the John Ryland's University Library during my Eras- mus year at University of Manchester, UK: The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigheisa Kuryiama (Kuriyama, 2002). This is not a book of Linguistics, and in fact it was stored in the Medicine section of the library, where I found myself having a walk during a pause in studying for the exams, wandering in the library corri- dors because it was raining too heavily to have a walk outside. Reading the volume, I discovered surprising connections to topics I encountered in the courses I took both Pisa and Manchester, such as metaphor, linguistic rela- tivity, construal of perceptions, styles of communication and so forth. The topic of the book is the comparative history of the practice of pulsetaking in Greek and Chinese medicine, and substancially it analyzes what and how Greek and Chinese physicians felt under their ngers when taking the pulse, which were the theoretical presuppositions behind their explanations of the pulsation felt, how they used language to describe the perceptions and to share medical knowledge.

The enormous dierence in conceiving the pulse which Kuriyama detects is not just interesting for the historian of medicine, but for the linguist too.

In fact, the book explains how the acceptance of each medical approach was based on the dierent reliability which the two cultures assigned to the sense of touch and to the discourse to describe haptic perceptions. The sense of touch was the one mainly involved in pulsetaking, therefore haptic percep- tions had to be analyzed, comprehended, classied, included in the global medical knowledge, transmitted with an eective language to the doctors in learning, written in treatises of expert physicians to improve the skillfullness of the medical professionists. Language was of primary importance to ex- press the haptic perception of pulsetaking, because seizing the right nuances of the pulsations meant to formulate a right diagnosis of the status of the pa- tient, to apply a proper therapy: doctors had to learn it, so someone had to

write treatises to describe the various detectable features of the pulse. The divergence of the Greek and the Chinese approach to pulsetaking (and to physiology in general) is dramatic, and according to Kuriyama it stems from the two dierent solutions given to the problem of conveying sensory percep- tions through language. Basically, Chinese physicians trusted in touch, while Greek physician did not. They preferred to switch to vision to investigate the phenomenon. Therefore, according to what emerges from the book, the relationship between sensory perception and language to describe it, presup- poses a culture-specic attitude toward the senses. More precisely, toward a hierarchy of reliability of the senses as instruments to know the world. Is this claim tenable?

Trying to answer this question, this dissertation investigates the rela- tionship between sensory perception and the language which conveys it. In chapter 2, synaesthesia has been chosen as the stepping stone for the study, because it links perception and language tightly and in a peculiar way. In fact, as a gure of speech, it denes sensory perceptions and makes more than one sense merge in a single expression. Phrases like sweet face, warm voice are just two examples of how everyday language can describe percep- tions of a modality through words dening qualities felt with other sensory modality: one feels sweetness with the sense of taste, but sweet is applied to a visual perception, that is a face; as for the second example, warmth is felt by the sense of touch, but here warm occurs to dene the quality of a voice, which is an auditory perception.

Section 2.1, Synaesthesia from the linguistic point of view aims to cast light on the principles behind this way of expressing perceptions. The topic cannot be tackled without some theoretical premises useful to uncover the cognitive principles underlying it. Following the account of metaphor by Lako and Johnson (Lako and Johnson, 2003) we consider synaesthesia as an instance of metaphor because it maps qualities of a sensory domain onto another: in this it applies the source-and-target principle found to be at the basis of metaphor. As metaphor is a way of conceptualizing knowledge, so it is synaesthesia, which focuses in particular on the construal of perceptions.

When the construal of perceptions is at stake, another basic framework is the one proposed by Leonard Talmy with the concept of ception, which intimately links perception and conception, clarifying how the two cannot be disjoined when the communication of sensory perception is studied. There- fore, it is clear how our sensory biological endowment and our cognitive schemas both enter into the study of synaesthesia. This conrms the valid- ity of the choice of synaesthesia as a topic to be analyzed in order to cast light on the interaction of perception and language.

Having claried in the section some controversial issues in the theoretical framework, a series of studies on linguistic synaesthesia can be analyzed and confronted. Sections 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 are entitled respectively In the

mainstream and Out of the mainstream. In fact two currents in the study of synaesthesia are detected, both dealing with a hierarchization of the sensory modalities which seems to be at the base of the explanation of the tendencies in synaesthesia, but ending up with dierent outcomes. All the studies in the mainstream make fundamental reference to an article by Joseph M. Williams on semantic change (Williams, 1976)  in turn based on a study by Stephen de Ullmann on English poetry (de Ullmann, 1945)  which claims a hierarchy of the sensory modalities on the basis of their higher or lower distinctiveness. The hierarchy is derived by the analysis of semantic shift in the history of the English language and by a study of the major patterns of synaesthesia occurring in English romantic poetry. According to this hierarchy, sight and hearing attract terms from other modalities both in synaestethic expressions and in semantic shift, and they are considered the highest sensory modalities. The complete ranking is: vision and hearing, smell, taste, touch.

More recent studies, such as the ones co-authored by Yeshayahu Shen (Shen, 1997; Shen and Gil, 2008; Shen and Aisenman, 2008), expand these

ndings to other languages (European languages, Hebrew and Indonesian) and connect them to the Lako and Johnson's cognitive constraint on metaphors.

On the one hand, the constraint says that mapping in a metaphor goes from a more concrete domain to a more abstract one, from a more salient to a less salient object or concept. On the other hand the synaesthesias observed in those studies seem to systematically show a pattern which is dened lower to higher, i.e. from lower modalities, such as touch and taste, to higher modalities such as sight and hearing, mirroring the hi- erarchy proposed by Williams. Hence, the two observations are connected and the lower to higher modality pattern is transferred onto the cognitive constraint from concrete to abstract domain and considered universal and predictive of the directionality of synaesthesia. This approach is not free from criticism, which is expressed in this thesis while reviewing the articles and which nd support in other studies shown in section 2.1.3 Out of the mainstream. These articles take into account synaesthesias in various lan- guages (Spanish, English, Basque) but they challenge the hierarchy proposed by the mainstream articles and suggest that the modality ranking is not as inescapable as the cognitive constraint. They point out counterexamples to the lower to higher mapping, by which the universality of this mapping is negated. Hence variability in the pattern of connecting senses is proposed, keeping however intact the cognitive constraints of metaphors as in Lako

and Johnson.

Having confronted examples of two opposing streams of research on synaesthesia, it seems that something more than counting examples and counterexamples has to be done to determine which may be right. That is why chapter 3 How senses work takes a look into the human nervous sys-

tem to check if there is a trace for a hierarchy of senses in human physiology.

The point is: if language mirrors a universal cognitive hierarchy of senses, as it is claimed in the mainstream, a hint for this should appear also in what all human beings actually share as vehicles to experience reality through senses: namely, their body and the principles of its working. Moreover, in a thesis about sensory perception, it seems correct to give an idea of how senses actually work, of their limits and of how the external enivironment

reaches our brain through our sensory apparatus. Therefore, section 3.1 Nervous system and impulse transmission briey sketch the structure of the human nervous system and of the brain, and describes how the nervous impulse is transmitted. Then, a review of the ve senses follows (section 3.2 The senses), where a description of the sensory receptors is given and of the stimuli they are responsive to. All receptors transduce external stimuli into electric activity in our body, then all our perceptions are discriminated and recognized by the brain: for every sense a picture emerges for which the discrimination and recognition of impulses occurs mainly in the brain cortex and in these tasks the secondary cortices, the association areas and the systems which collect impulses from dierent sensory pathways are par- ticularly important. Section 3.3 The senses in the brain, reports studies on cerebral plasticity, merging of perceptions and mirror neurons circuits, which give an account of the neurological views on the integration of the senses among them and with other cortical systems. What is interesting is that cortical plasticity is inuenced by the real experience of the living sub- ject: the neural networks are not totally dened once and for all by genetic constraints. Moreover, the conuence of the sensory perceptions in the brain and the merging of sensations with acquired knowledge is a dynamic process, by which neural structures can be remodelled and adapted by the ongoing experience of the person. Therefore, at the end of the excursus on senses and brain, it seems that physiology and neurology reach conclusions more consonant with the out of the mainstream approach to synaesthesia. In fact, this approach proposes a possibility for a modelling of relations among senses which can be various and not constrained by xed and inescapable patterns.

Variability in the relationship among the sensory modalities is a concept which is protable for anthropological studies, as chapter 4 Other perspec- tives on how senses work presents. Walter Ong writes that each person is brought up in a culture which teaches how to attend perceptions in a specic way and how to select the most relevant perceptual features for the tasks considered more important (Ong, 1991). He talks of a shifting sensorium

which arranges in various patterns the senses and the sensory perceptions with a variability that is exquisitely culture-specic.

In section 4.1 The sensotype hypothesis Mallory Wober applies this perspective to clarify a particular case, which is a previous study where a

group of American and a group of Nigerian individuals were comparatively tested on analytical perceptual abilities. Wober proposes that tests and studies should be submitted to dierent groups only having previously as- sessed the particular arrangement of their sensorium and the skillfulness in each senses induced by their culture, which he calls sensotype. Otherwise, the ndings risk to be biased if the researcher assumes that the arrangement of sensorium is equal all over the world. The fact is that the researchers themselves are persons of a particular sensotype, therefore they could assign to some senses a predominance that comes from their having been raised in a certain culture, and this may have an inuence in the choice of the modalities to be tested and in the interpretation of the test results.

With this framework on perceptual tests in mind, a reection on one of the most widely practised tests in psycholinguistics is made in section 4.2 (Can a word be coloured?). The Stroop test is taken into account for its being a visual test linking colors and color words to measure semantic inter- ference and attention shift. The applicability of the test seems the widest and simplest, considering that just colors and words are involved in the test.

However, the relationship between colors and words may vary in dierent languages and cultures, according to the saliency ascribed by each culture to colors and coloured items. There are cultures, in fact, which use color words just to describe the coat of domestic animals, as is the case for Gizey, as Roberto Ajello reports (Ajello, 2007). In Gizey, colours are talked of only in reference to animals (and to some other restricted category of items, as it will be seen): would the instruction on which the Stroop test is based, i.e.

name the color of this word, make some sense in Gizey? In this section some interrogatives are raised, such as the range of application for Stroop tests, and the scope of its validity, proposing an area in which further re- search would possibly be fruitful in methodology for psycholinguistic tests.

Psycholinguistics, however, is not the core of the present thesis, therefore section 4.3 Synaesthesia and sensotype: a matter of taste tackles the main topic of synaesthesia anew.

The perspective on the arrangements of senses is broadened by the studies of other languages and cultures presented so far, and particularly by the con- ception of the existence of dierent sensotypes. Could such a perspective be applied to the problem of the hierarchy of senses as it arises from the linguis- tic studies on synaesthesia? In this section, an ongoing study on synaesthesia in Indonesian language is examined (Shen and Gil, 2008). The study aims to validate the mainstream hierarchy of senses and the directionality of synaesthesia, assessed in previous studies of other languages, for Indonesian expressions. The discovery of the same hierarchy in Indonesian would be a good point in favour to the universality of such a hierarchy. The results of the study are partially in accord with the ndings in cross-lingustic studies but there are problems in reducing all senses to the hierarchy. Taste in par-

ticular is not easily reducible to the expected position. This is why in section 4.3.2 Weyéwa and taste an anthropological study in the role of taste in an Indonesian population is taken into account, in the attempt to enlarge the vision of the relationship among senses in Indonesian and to propose how linguistics could benet from an outlook on senses which contemplates a cultural variability of their reciprocal relationship.

At this point some instruments to begin to answer the initial question have been presented: it is time to better analyze the study which raised the problem and see if and how (at the light of previous chapters) a further read- ing of it can contribute to the solution of the question. Therefore, in chapter 5 A lesson on senses that comes from the East Kuriyama's book on Greek and Chinese medicine is reviewed. The dierencies in the two prac- tises of the Greek and Chinese pulsetaking are presented, and the reasons from which they stem explained. Kuriyama connects language, cultural pre- suppositions and sensorial hierarchy to the development of ancient medicine, oering occasion to see the three factors at work in shaping and guiding experience and knowledge in dierent directions. This approach would be useful to give an answer to the question of the title A hierarchy of senses:

does it make sense? and to propose perspectives for further research, as it would be presented in the Conclusion.

. . .

In appendix the phenomenon of perceptual synaesthesia is sketched:

synaesthesia is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but it occurs in some subjects as a neurological condition which generates actual multisensorial perceptions. There are people, in fact, who really experience the vision of colours whenever they hear precise sounds or see certain letters as always tinged in colours even if the letters are written in black (Cytowic, 2002a;

Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001b). In this section the neurological phe- nomenon is presented and briey analyzed. Interestingly, what seems due to a pure neurological cross-wiring of brain areas, it is triggered by the experi- ence of culturally dened perceptions, such as musical tones or letters, which generate the co-occurrent sensation of basic percepts such as coloured hues or oating forms. Therefore, even a peculiar neurological phenomenon such as perceptual synaesthesia needs culture-specic perceptions to manifest it- self. One might say that whenever perception is involved, culture knocks at the door.

Chapter 2

Synaesthesia: a stepping stone to perception

Synaesthesia is a word derived from ancient Greek: from syn with, to- gether, and aesthesis perception or sensation, it means union of senses.

This is the name of the gure of speech by which elements perceived through a sensory modality can be described or qualied by expressions belonging to other sensory modalities. Expressions like a bright voice, a warm colour,

a sweet face, just to mention a few examples, are instances of synaesthesia in everyday speech: they connect dierent sensory domains a single expres- sion, linking (respectively) visual and auditory domains, tactile and visual, gustatory and visual. With the same word synaesthesia we indicate a per- ceptual phenomenon too, which occurs when an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimu- lated. For example, a synaesthete may experience a specic colour whenever she encounters a particular tone (e.g., C-sharp may be blue) or may see any given number as always tinged a certain colour (e.g., 5 may be green and 6 may be red) (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001b, p. 4).

2.1 Synaesthesia as a gure of speech

2.1.1 Theoretical clarications

As anticipated, the term synaesthesia denes a gure of speech where the transfer of a lexeme from one sensory area to another (Williams, 1976, p. 463) occurs. As Yeshayahu Shen exemplify in the Encyclopedia of Lan- guage and Linguistics (entry Figures of speech: Synaesthesia)

Keats' `heard melodies are sweet' evokes a clearly auditory con- cept (heard melodies) in terms belonging to the realm of taste (sweetness). The expression a cold light is another example of a synesthetic metaphor. In this case, light, which is linked to the

visual domain, is dened in terms of coldness, which belongs to the tactile domain.

There are many studies on poetry and everyday speech (Marks, 1982;

Shen, 1997; Bretones Callejas, 2001; Cacciari, 2008) that aim to cast light on this gure of speech. Some of the more recent papers try to link data from linguistic analysis directly to data from neurology and psychology, outlining a complex picture, rich in stepping stones for further investigation.

An article on synaesthesia by Lawrence Marks (Marks, 1982) opens with the following lines:

Which is brighter, a cough or a sneeze? If you ask several peo- ple this slightly strange-sounding question, by far the majority respond by saying that a sneeze is brighter. If the question is asked from the other pole  namely, which is darker?  most say a cough. What aspects of our perceptions  or conceptions

 of sneezes and coughs enable us so readily to ascribe to them the nominally visual descriptions bright and dark? (Marks, 1982, p. 177).

Marks talks of conception in the very rst paragraph of his article:

it is an urgent issue, because as soon as we perceive something we cannot help to ascribe to it a meaning, given either by the context of the situation we are in, by our knowledge of the past, by our cultural background, by our superstitions, by our emotive condition, or by a blend of all of these factors. . .

Following Leonard Talmy (Talmy, 2000) we could say that what we deal with when we tackle the problem of expressing perceptions with language, is ception. Ception is a neologism that gives name to a concept derived by a reection on both perception and conception. As the word suggests, ception is what per-ception and con-ception have in common. Ception activates a framework that helps to understand the intertwining of sensory perception and the construal of it, especially when expressed through language.

For example, as I view a particular gure before me, is my iden- tication of it as a knife to be understood as part of my per- ceptual processing of the visual stimuli, or instead part of some other, perhaps later, cognitive processing? And if such identi- cation is considered part of perception, what about my thought of potential danger that occurs on viewing the object? Moreover, psychologists not only disagree on where to locate a distinctional boundary, but also on whether there even is a principled ba- sis on which one can adduce the existence of such a boundary.

Accordingly, it seems advisable to establish a theoretical frame- work that does not imply discrete categories and clearly located

boundaries, and that recognizes a cognitive domain encompass- ing traditional notions of both perception and conception. Such a framework would then further allow for the positing of certain cognitive parameters that extend continuously through the larger domain (as described later). To this end, we adopt the notion of ception here to cover all the cognitive phenomena, conscious and unconscious, understood by the conjunction of perception and conception (Talmy, 2000, p. 139).

Talmy uses this framework to individualizing cognitive parameters and criteria operating in language. We will not go further in this direction, our reference to ception here is just an evidence of the fact that it is not productive to insist on disjoining conception and perception when analysing language, it may even be impossible: on the contrary both dimensions must be taken into account, leading to a more eective paradigm that tries to pay attention to all aspects of experience. Consequently, we will consider synaesthetic expressions a phenomena of ception and we will proceed in our analysis trying not to forget both aspects of conception and perception.

Other authors have considered the distinction between physiological sen- sory experience and conceptual activity as a problematic issue. For example, Maria Catricalà (Catricalà, 2008) ascribes the problem to the analysis of metaphor, taking into account the view of Lako and Johnson in Metaphors we live by:

In the account given by Lako and Johnson (1980), the metaphor is a cognitive mechanism that draws correspondences among dif- ferent experiential domains, not just a gure of speech. Struc- ture of reality and conceptual categories are explained as prod- ucts of mind, created by physical (embodiment, hence basic and universal), cultural and social experience¹(Catricalà, 2008, p. 25).

In our opinion, the passage is a good representative of the complexity of the issue, because it contains some truth, but also some misleading ex- pressions. In this, it oers us occasion to examine and clarify controversial points. To begin with, structure of reality and conceptual categories are not both products of mind, as Catricalà writes. There is a world outside there (that is the structure of reality) that exists even if our senses do not perceive it and our mind is not aware of it. This is not a product of human mind. Not tackling this issue from the philosophical side, it will be sucient to mention

1Original version (The English translation of this Italian quotations, as for the following ones, is mine): Nel quadro di Lako e Johnson (1980), la metafora è da considerarsi un meccanismo cognitivo di corrispondenza tra domini diversi dell'esperienza e non una semplice gura del discorso. La struttura del reale, le categorie concettuali sono viste come un prodotto della mente costruito a partire dall'esperienza sica (embodiment e, dunque, basica e universale), culturale e sociale

infra- and ultrasounds, magnetic elds, invisible particles, bacteria that do exist even if our sensory system is not naturally capable of an immediate experience of them: the senses cannot detect them, hence they will not enter in the construction of conceptual categories. An indirect evidence of this may be the fact that even scientic discourse is rich in metaphors which aim to reconduct the explanation of physical phenomena to sensorily detectable objects and events (electricity and magnetism are forces, magnetism ex- tends its scope on a eld, electricity is current and so on). As Lako and Johnson note, Every scientic theory is constructed by scientists  human beings who necessarily use the tools of human mind. One of those tools is conceptual metaphor (Lako and Johnson, 2003, p. 252).

In Catricalà's summary of metaphor as a cognitive metaphor, another controversial point is the consideration of physical experience as basic and universal. No doubt that it can be considered basic, because it consists in direct contact between man and environment. As for universal, it is not clear if Catricalà wants to say that every human being has physical experience (that would be trivial) or if she claims that every human being has identical physical experiences (which would be wrong). Our genes give each one of us an equal physiological sensory potential at birth, but (as Catricalà herself correctly points out) it is our cultural and social experience that gives shape and meaning to our perceptions, thus developing the same basic endowment in a way dierent for each human being (Barbujani, 2006, p. 45).

2.1.2 A hierarchy of senses: does it make sense?

The study by Marks we have quoted in the beginning of the chapter examined how language expresses features of auditive perception, such as loudness and pitch, and of visual perception, such as brightness. Literal or metaphori- cal expressions involving light or sound have been submitted to subjects in several experiments, asking them to rate the expressions according to brightness, loudness, or height in pitch. For example, a murmur resulted in scoring a mean loudness of 29, but the murmur of dawn a loudness of 32 and a brightness of 105, while the murmur of sunlight a loudness of 48 and a brightness of 130. The rating of brightness, loudness and pitch of linguistic synaesthesias joining auditory and visual concepts, has been confronted to experiences reported by synaesthetes for which sounds trigger visions. The correlations in metaphor reect the ones in experienced synaesthesia (e.g.

the higher the pitch of the sound, the brighter the vision) and it seems that brightness is a feature tied to the pitch and to the intensity of the sounds.

The data gathered lead Marks to conclude that brightness may be a characteristic of the auditory medium and the visual medium alike. [...] this cross-modal similarity comes to be [...] part and

parcel of our implicit knowledge about our perceptual experience.

And this knowledge can express itself into language. If this view is correct then [...] <synaesthetic expression> may have its root in some fundamental, phenomenological property of the makeup of sensory experience. (Marks, 1982, p. 192).

That is to say, there is a way in which we perceive the world we are not aware of, namely our implicit knowlegde, which pops out in linguistic expressions as synaesthetic phrases, possibly mirroring how our brain links multisensorial experiences.

Carrying on this line of research, Cristina Cacciari (Cacciari, 2008) studies linguistic synaesthesia, in order to dene it better, and use it as a tool to investigate the makeup of sensory experience in the brain. Her work sum- marizes a vast amount of papers, dating back from Ullmann, 1945² to the

rst years of 2000.

One of the bases from which the study of Cacciari moves is a paper by Joseph Williams, dated 1976. It is worth discussing, because it is quoted in a vast number of the studies on linguistic synaesthesia as a fundamental contribution. This paper aimed at nding a `semantic law' to explain and predict semantic change in any language. The work is in turn based on the

ndings of Stephen de Ullmann, who gave account of a regularity of trans- fer in synaesthetic metaphors in 19th century English poetry, in a study entitled Romanticism and Synaesthesia (de Ullmann, 1945). As Williams summarizes, the semantic eld of a tactile experience provided the largest number of lexemes transferred to other sensory modalities; the semantic eld of acoustic words received the greatest number of items (Williams, 1976, p. 463). The studies of Ullmann were syncronic: however, Williams took the transfer schema and linked it to lexical forms from Old and Middle English Dictionaries in a diacronic perspective.

If we read Ullmann himself, anyway, towards the end of one of his papers on Byron and Keats, we nd:

It has been my purpose throughout this essay to show that Byron was, in his use of sense transfer, characteristic of general human tendencies, and of the background peculiar to his age, without any substantial contribution of his own, whereas in Keats' case personal idiosyncrasies asserted themselves to such an extent that the groundwork of universally human and of romantic tendencies is much less obvious. The results of this dierence are mostly in Keats' favour, but by no means necessarily so. Some of his vivid

2If we exclude a mention of La physiologie du gôut. Méditations de gastronomie trascen- dente by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825.

and daring similes may fail to attune the reader to his mode of vision:

Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, And oat along like birds o'er summer seas (To C. C. Clarke, p. 28)

... for lovely airs

Are uttering round the room like doves in pairs (Sleepand Poetry, p. 46)

or this passage in Endymion (III, p. 219):

... and on

Her voice I hung like fruit among green leaves.

These images are all perfectly comprehensible, but their aesthetic appropriateness is not above dispute. [...] While Byron had to make an eort to keep in line with the mildly synaesthetic fash- ions of his time, Keats had almost to ght against a constraint, an inner urge impelling him to reect in his poetry the interplay of sensations which was constantly taking place in his own mind (de Ullmann, 1945, p. 827-026).

Why Keats's idiosyncrasies should collocate him outside the scope of hu- man tendencies, if compared to Byron, it is not so easily understandable. All human beings have their own idiosyncrasies, as far as is known. Moreover, Ullmann is considering issues of mode of vision, aesthetic appropriateness,

fashion, of which standards may be hardly dened. But above all, given that the expressions mentioned are perfectly comprehensible, those issues should be irrelevant for the linguist.³ In spite of that, Williams includes Ullmann's ndings in his work, linking them with his own statistic data, summarized in a general schema. The resulting picture is a perfect corre- spondence of the directionality of the syncronic metaphorical transfer with the directionality of the diacronic semantic shift. Arrows in the gure show the direction of the meaning transfer: from touch, to taste, to smell, to sight and hearing (or to hearing and sight).

Williams says that this schema shows the direction of rst-order trans- fers, i.e. the rst metaphorical extension of a lexeme from its original sensory modality to a new one⁴ and reports that sensory words in English have systematically transferred from the physiologically least dierentiating, most evolutionary primitive sensory modalities to the most dierentiating, most advanced, but not vice versa (Williams, 1976, p. 464-465).

3It goes without saying that even asserting this, we do not intend to diminish the value of the ne literary analysis of Ullmann

4In fact, accounting for post-rst-order changes is a less clear-cut problem than ac- counting for rst-order transfers (Williams, 1976, p. 465).

Figure 2.1: Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities according to Williams (Williams, 1976, p. 463).

The distinction of the senses as least/most dierentiating, primitive/ad- vanced generates some perplexity. What does this distinction mean? It pos- tulates a hierarchy of senses: what should it be based on? As can be read in the paper, the bases are the writings of Aristotle, Democritus, Aquinas, plus descriptions of human phylogenesis and onthogenesis. Williams briey describes the account that the three philosophers give of human sensorium as bearing the order sight-hearing-smell-taste-touch, then the physiological sequence of maturation (measured in myelinization of neural cortices) of the senses: tactile rst, then olfactory, then either optic-acoustic or acoustic- optic. Subsequently, Williams suggests that some principle of sequential relationship might underlie not only semantic change but other sensory sys- tems as well and that connections might exist among ontogeny, phylogeny, the neurophysiology of sensation, cognition, and naming (Williams, 1976, p. 472, 473). Those claims are what makes William's study one of the bases of present investigation on synaesthesia (to refer only to a few: Cacciari, 2008, Shen and Aisenman, 2008, Brown and Anderson, 2006, p. 459, Catri- calà, 2008). It is worth investigating what they rest on.

The physiological development of senses in itself does not prove anything related to a supposed hierarchy: on the contrary, it could substantiate the opposite claim. In fact, if it is true that there is a sense more important than the others, it would be better that an infant has it pefectly active as soon as possible. Thus this sense may be considered hierarchically the rst, the one necessary as a foundation for the further development of the organ- ism. Hence, it follows that touch should be rst in the rank. However, the hierarchical paradigm itself is unsound here. In fact, it uses a physiological sequence to support an historical fact, namely, language shift. Moreover, even if we remain merely inside language, the equation directionality is hi- erarchy does not hold. Williams claims that the transfer goes from tactile to visual or auditive: well, why not use this claim to underpin that the visual or the auditive domains lack an adequate inventory of lexemes to express all the qualities eyes and ears can perceive? Expressions as soft light, sweet melody, rough sound, could possibly prove an evaluation of the domains of hearing and sight as lexically weak, in need of other specications they can- not nd in themselves. Therefore, tactile and gustatory domains give help:

they are more powerful and descriptive, they can lend part of their meaning potential to other domains.

These objections and hypothetical answers, would like to make this con- cept emerge: it is not so automatic to infer hierarchy from mere direction- ality. It would be like saying that the mouth is more important than the stomach because the former is in a higher position.

As for the reference to Aristotle, Democritus and Aquinas: these three immense intellects were active in philosophy, science and theology, deal- ing with crucial questions with astonishing foresight and immortal wisdom.

However, their ndings about human sensorium may be biased by their in- quiry for symmetry and order, by their urgence to nd in the Man a hierarchy that may recall the one they were discovering in the Universe. Just to men- tion, in the tenth book of Confessions, by Aquinas, it is clear that speculation on senses is due to a reection on the right path to follow for the human soul.

In that book there is matter to hate each sense and make all of them in turn repulsive and inferior to the others. Furthermore, it goes without saying, the scientic equipment these scholars could take advantage of was lacking of some machinery invented later, which now allows us to empirically test theories and hypotheses on the human body and discover a bit more about human physiology and evolution.

However, reasons for doubting about the legitimacy of the transformation of the linguistic hierarchy into a biological truth, come from Williams him- self. In fact, after having proposed the equation `directionality of semantic transfer  hierarchy of senses', he adds:

(It should be strongly emphasized that the following are pre- sented only as striking parallels, to pique interest. No cause- eect relationship whatever is claimed).⁵ [...] It is pointless to seek anyhing parallel fo Fig.1⁶ in the arrangement of association cortices, despite an occasional correspondence in other regards.

[...] Obviously it is presumptuous, to say the least, to seek a biological foundation for a phenomenon that may not universally exist, in an aspect of human cognition about which very little is known. But the parallels that do exist indicate that further research might not be fruitless. Indeed the possibility, however slight, that connections might exist among ontogeny, phylogeny, the neuro-physiology of sensation, cognition, and naming sug- gests a point of interaction between mind and brain (Williams, 1976, p. 472-473).

We have no objection to the fact that Williams pointed out a regular- ity of the semantic change in English, but it seems reasonable to doubt of

5Funnily enough, what should be strongly emphasized is relegated in brackets.

6Quoted as Figure 2.1 in our text.

the validity of the direct connection with actual physiological facts: this is presented by the author himself, as we have quoted, as a possibility and a suggestion for further investigation and clarication.⁷ In spite of that, the link between semantic change and sensorial hierarchy has been taken as a matter of fact. Therefore, William's schema is published at the beginning of many papers (Cacciari, 2008; Catricalà, 2008) and quoted as fundamental in various works (Shen and Aisenman, 2008; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001a,b): in doing that, the secondary sources have transformed the results of a study in the history of the English language into an ultimate cognitive truth.

2.1.3 In the mainstream: ndings in poetry and everyday language

The studies of Yeshayahu Shen (University of Tel Aviv) on metaphor and synaesthesia are vast and detailed and can be considered exemplar in the

eld. Not by chance he has been chosen as editor of the entry Figures of speech in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.

We are going to review some studies by him and his co-workers, to have an insight on what the issues at stake are in the mainstream of studies on linguistic synaesthesia.

Before dealing directly with synaesthesia, it is necessary to present meth- ods and results of Shen's study on similes (Shen, 1997), because some of these

ndings he also applies to the analysis of synaesthetic expressions. Similes are observed in a corpus of Hebrew poetry and the directionality of the mapping is analyzed. Shen, in accord with Lako and Johnson's approach, pictures a situation where mapping procedes from a concrete source to an abstract target, as in

Emptiness is like a weight, heavy on the heart (abstract target) (concrete source)

or, when source and target are equally concrete, mapping goes from a more salient item to a less salient:

A ock of birds leaves as a jet airplane (less salient target) (more salient source)

In this last example, a jet airplane is considered more salient than a ock of birds. Why should this be the case? The judgment on con- creteness and saliency in the study of Shen has been made by four judges, students from the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel

7There are, indeed, connections among ontogeny, neuro-physiology, cognition, naming, widely investigated especially in the eld of language acquisition: see Michael Tomasello's Constructing a language, (Tomasello, 2003) for an up-to date reference.

Aviv University. Most dierences were resolved following a discussion, and agreement was reached in 85 to 90 percent of the cases [...] In the very few cases where no agreement was reached, the similes were replaced by new ones (Shen, 1997, p. 41). As far as I am concerned, an evaluation of higher saliency for an airplane than a bird is not the only possible option. That is, a bird as a leaving ying object could be much more salient than a jet airplane. In fact, a bird opens its wings and instantaneously leaves in the air, while an airplane (even if a jet) needs an air-run strip on the ground before taking o. The examples to be judged are given with no context, so it was quite dicult to constitute an ad hoc category on which the salience judgment was to be grounded. The category connecting ocks of birds and jets is assumed to be objects that leave ying. But it may even be things that make a high noise when leaving, or things that y fast. Depending on the dierent choice of an ad hoc category, the salience results may be various. With such a variety of interpretations, agreement in the judgement would probably not have been achieved. Therefore, this simile that now is an example of preferred pattern would probably have been discarded. Con- sidering this, together with the very small number of judges and their equal academic background, it seems that a tendency to uniformity is active from the point of the gathering of data for the study. This possibly aectis the conduction of the tests and consequently the results.

However, taken as factual the rate of saliency and concreteness stated by the four judges, the analysis of the similes in the four corpora gives a high percentage of abstract-concrete mapping and salient-non salient mapping.

What is the reason for this preference of pattern? Shen proposes a cognitive constraint underlying the choice of directionality, referring to the natural cat- egory notion elaborated by Eleanor Rosch (Rosch, 1975). Rosch states that every category is constructed around a better representative, a prototypical member of the category, very easy to identify and recall for the subject. The membership of an item to the category is decided on the basis of the degree of similarity of the item with the prototype, or considering relevant features shared (or not) by both item and prototype. The prototype is a reference for the subject that build categories related to it, and it is easily accessible by cognition in all its features, because it has to be eciently compared to any other object. If we want to explain perceptions with the notion of natural category, we can consider stimuli as members of categories, so that

a distinction can be drawn between the reference stimulus (assumed to be more accessible) and stimuli which deviate from the reference stimuli

(assumed to be less accessible) (Shen, 1997, p. 44).

The best representatives of categories have high concreteness and/or high salience, they are more accessible, therefore they are more likely to be consid- ered as sources to dene less salient concepts or entities. Equally, perceptual stimuli can be grouped according to accessibility, saliency and similarity, so that more accessible stimuli are sources to dene less accessible ones. This

is the cognitive constraint to which the directionality of similes conforms. It is a quite well supported claim and there is no diculty in accepting it as a matter of fact (Lako and Johnson, 2003; Croft and Cruse, 2004).

At this point it would be interesting, and in fact necessary to understand what makes a concept or an entity more or less salient, more or less a good representative, more or less likely to be used as a source in a simile. The cog- nitive constraint of a directionality of mapping from a more concrete item to a less concrete one, is to be considered universal (Lako and Johnson, 2003;

Croft and Cruse, 2004; Bernd, 1997): nevertheless, the forms of its realiza- tion may vary. To refer back to the example of the ock of birds and the jet airplane: for some people, birds may be more salient than airplanes, for rea- sons which could be linked to their experience, e.g. living in the countryside.

For those individuals, birds are better representatives for the category of ob- jects that y, more accessible, so birds would rather be used than airplanes as a source. That may not be the case of the writer's experience, who may consider airplanes as better representatives than birds, therfore the preferred choice for source items. In conclusion, personal experience plays a pivotal role in the constitution of an entity as more or less salient: in Shen's study, a wider pool of judges, with more dierenciated experiences may easily have provided judgements other than the ones from which the study stems. This does not undermine the universal validity of the constraint on metaphor but makes necessary the consideration that there may be dierent realizations of the same constraint. Studies in a single language and cross linguistic studies may emphasize the presence of more frequent realizations, but, as proposed with this thesis, this does not rule out other tendencies in realizing the con- straint.

Having elaborated the notion of the cognitive constraint of directionality of similes, we can turn to the analysis of poetic synaesthesia, to investigate more closely the relation between physical perception and language.

Once more, the problem at stake is the content of the directionality of mapping. Properties from one source sensory modality are mapped onto a target perception of a dierent modality. What is the directionality between modalities and why? Shen wants to explain the reasons for the choice of directionality. In fact, as it will be understood, the paper does not only pro- vide a description of tendencies in the mapping but, after having explained the cognitive constraint underlying, it proposes a physiological reason as the ultimate cause for this constraint.

Shen's analysis draws directly on Ullmann's seminal study of poetic synaesthesia (Shen, 1997). It is Romanticism and synaesthesia, again. Ull- mann's main assumption is fully embraced, and the hierarchy of the distinc- tiveness of modalities is taken as factual.

Modalities can represent a range of options on a distinctiveness

scale: from the most distinct modality to the least distinct one.

The most distinct modality is sight, followed (in this order) by sound, scent, taste, to the least distinct sense, namely, touch. [...]

Poetic synaesthesia systematically prefers to map terms of lower distinctiveness onto higher distinctiveness, rather than vice versa (Shen, 1997).

There would be modalities more likely to occupy the role of source in the mapping due to their higher distinctivness. Distinctive traits show up as a constant of the discourse in studies on sensory experience, until the recent study by Maria Catricalà (2008):

. . . dierent distinctiveness of each sense: the higher is the num- ber of distinctive traits perceived through a modality, the higher the probability for that modality to be used as veichle for other kinds of information (Catricalà, 2008, p. 18).⁸

Distinctiveness seems a fundamental property of senses, to be evaluated in order to give them a correct place in the rank. How to ascertain it? What is the distinctiveness of a sense? How distinction among objects and qual- ities perceived by a sense can be comparable to the distinction operated by another sense? How to measure the distance between red and yellow, be- tween sound of rain/chirping of birds, between smell of basil/smell of orange, between fur of terranova/fur of bassethound, on a same single scale and then establish which sense can detect the smallest dierence on such a common scale? Every sensory detection should be divided into distinctive traits, so that thay can be counted. Then a way to see which sense is able to detect more traits should be found. How to do that? An inventory of lexicon for each sense could be a provisional working hypothesis. Here a more detailed account cannot be provided (however, it would be interesting to carry on further research on this point), but at the same time an example taken from introspection and the native competence of Italian language of who is writing can be given.⁹

Adjectives can be considered the linguistic means to express objects' qualities and perceptual characteristics. In Italian there are many more ad- jectives to describe colours and shapes than avours. This could be consid- ered due to a superiority of sight in discriminating distinctive traits of visual

8Original version: ... diversa capacità selettiva d'ogni senso: quanto più numerosi risultano i tratti distintivi percepiti attraverso un canale, tanto piú numerose risultereb- bero le possibilità della dimensione sensoriale di riferimento di essere utilizzata come ve- hicle, strumento veicolare di informazioni d'altro genere.

9For an account on the legitimacy of linguistic introspection as a method to (at least) formulate hypothesis for further research, see Introspection as a Methodology in Linguis- tics, by Leonard Talmy.

URL: http://linguistics.bualo.edu/people/faculty/talmy/talmyweb/Handouts/

introspection2.pdf (Talmy)

perceptions with respect to the abilities of taste in discriminating avours.

More traits discriminated, more lexicon needed to describe them. A scarce inventory of lexical items dening gustatory perceptions, should sustain the hypothesis of taste as a secondary sense, not providing perspicuous inputs.

Less distinctiveness, hence, less adjectives needed. Inferiority of taste seems therefore proved by linguistic evidence. However, what to say about the countless cookbooks crowding bookshop shelves, the TV cooking shows, the pages dedicated to food and drink in magazines, the curiosity towards exotic cuisine and the opening of new restaurants, the people chatting about how they baked better biscuits following granny's advice? Is this all a measure of the minor distinctive ability of the sense of taste? It may be true that for historical reasons Italian has not so many adjectives to describe food and

avours. But that does not mean that Italians are not able to distinguish minute dierences in avours and seasonings, or to guess ingredients by the taste, or even by the smell. Italian language allows to say that a biscuit has a avour of orange, cinnamon and apple, that new olive oil tastes like grass:

no adjectives are employed in this expressions, but the ways of describing food are many, because all the ingredients could be listed, and each of the specic avours labelled with phrases like a taste of... it tastes of... this is like..... If one wants to stick to the concept of distinctive traits which taste can cope with, it is evident that a criterion which only counts adjec- tival forms is (at least) not sucient. To assess the distinctive capacity of the sense of taste, all the chemical molecules our gustative receptors can discriminate should be listed. Then what is the inuence of dierent tem- perature and humidity of foods on taste discrimination, should be assessed and so on. It is easy to see that we are entering a territory not pertinent to linguistics, but more to physiology: this should be a rst evidence of the fact that drawing conclusions about perception and hierarchy of senses relying only on linguistic facts may not be so legitimate.

Shen's article, however, believes in the hierarchy of senses, and proceeds with the analysis of synaesthetic expressions in a corpus of Hebrew 20th century poetry. Synaesthesias are graded by distinctiveness and direction- ality by two judges (half of the court if compared to the study on similes) and all the synaesthetic expressions analyzed are couplets of adjective plus noun, e.g. a cold light. The target domain is the modality which detects the object to qualify (light, hence sight), whereas the source domain is the modality to which the adjective refers (cold, hence touch). The ndings in the Hebrew corpus are coherent with Ullmann's data drawn upon English, French and Hungarian poetry, conrming that the directionality reects a preference for a more natural or basic structure over its inverse (Shen, 1997, p. 50). Not to rely only on the comprehension of the given synaesthe- sia, Shen makes a step further: he proposes to a group of informants (twenty undergraduate Hebrew native speakers) a series of synaesthetic expressions

following the mapping proposed by Williams, each paired with a synaesthesia with opposite directionality. Each pair consisting of a metaphor extracted from a Hebrew poem (e.g., a cold light) and a counterpart consisting of the same modalities but reecting the opposite directionality (a lighted cold- ness) (Shen, 1997, p. 51). Subjects are asked to assess the expressions indicating the more natural and comprehensible. The results conrmed the hypothesis: synaesthesias following Ullmann's directionality are judged more natural and comprehensible. To further conrm the hypothesis, a recall task is performed. Subjects have to read the list of synaesthetic expressions then, after a while, they are asked to write down as many expressions they can remember. A recall task such as this should avoid any eect of immediate preference for a couplet that may bias the judgement of comprehensibility and naturalness. The hypothesis is that synesthesia following directionality is easier to understand and recall.

Subjects for this experiment are 95 undergraduate students from Tel Aviv University. Synaesthetic expressions to be judged are 24: twelve (said stan- dard) follow Ullmann's directionality, twelve show reversed directionality.

Here we give a couple of examples:

standard reversed

A cold light A lighted coldness A sweet silence A silent sweetness

At this point it is convenient to refer to a subsequent study, by Shen and Ravid Aisenman, on synaesthesia in everyday Hebrew language (Shen and Aisenman, 2008). Methods and results are coherent with Shen's study on poetic language, they can be happily discussed together. Shen and Aisen- man's study also takes into account the easiness of generation of contexts for isolated synaesthesia, as a measure of preference of a mapping over the other. In this task, subjects read a series of standard and reversed synaes- thesias: for each of them, they were asked to generate a proper context for them. Then they have to compare the level of diculty they encountered in creating the context for each synaesthesia. Here it is quoted a sample of the synaestetic expressions the subjects worked on (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 115).

standard reversed

A hot bitterness A bitterish heat A salty bluntness A blunt saltiness A suntanned sharpness A sharp suntan A hot paleness A pale heat A whispering roughness A rough whisper A pale sourness A sour paleness

Results show that expressions following standard mapping are better recalled and easier to be included in a context than the reversed synaesthe- sias. The reason for the preference is identied by Shen and Aisenman in the same cognitive principle stated after the analysis of similes. Similes are possible because a more accessible concept is mapped onto a less accessible one: analogically, synaesthesia is possible because a more accessible sensory modality maps its specications onto a less accessible modality. Obeying the hierarchical law, the more accessible modalities are dened lower, the less accessible higher. Therefore,

the lower-to-higher structure is cognitively more natural than its inverse. In this respect, synaesthesia is but a special case of a cognitive principle that applies to metaphors in general. The principle states: Mapping from a more concrete concept onto a less concrete one is more natural than the inverse. [...] Applying this general cognitive principle to synaesthesia suggests that the concepts belonging to the lower senses, such as touch and taste, are more `concrete' (hence more accessible) than those belonging to higher senses, such as sound and sight (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 111).

Dening something as more accessible than something else, compels to provide an explanation of what accessibility is. Shen (Shen, 1997) takes into account physiology: higher modalities (sight, hearing) use specic organs to convey perceptions, and there is no direct contact between the body and the object of perception. Conversely, in lower modalities as touch, perceptions are not mediated by any organ and involve direct contact with the object of perception: hence they are more direct and accessible modalities (Shen, 1997, p. 54). Accessibility should be then related with immediateness of perception and closeness of the stimulus to the body. We believe this could hold only as a provisional explanation, exhibiting controversial points: all perceptions are mediated by receptor cells, because every entity to be de- tected by our body must make some neurons activate to send the information to the brain, and hands and skin may be considered organs too: it could be said that an immediate contact does not exist. So to relate accessibility to such an aspect of physiology seems not a productive solution. In fact, an improved explanation is provided in the more recent article (Shen and Aisen- man, 2008): a distinction among senses is drawn considering the dierence between experiencer-based and object-based sensations. Emphasis is placed not in the physiology of senses but in the way perceptions are conceived by the experiencer.

Experiencer-based sensations are those that are sensed as a physio- logical sensation of the experiencer, while object-based sensations are those that are understood as belonging to the object taken