Abstract
Large lexica of basic smell terms are considered to be restricted to a handful of small languages of non-industrialized societies. Accordingly, they are thought to belong to the sphere of rara within lexical typology (Plank 2001. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett. Konstanz: University of Konstanz. https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/intro/index.php (accessed 3 October 2017)). However, smell lexica might in fact be more common than previously suggested. In this article, we discuss the case of Thai – a language with a population of tens of millions of speakers – which defies this assumption. We show Thai has a sizeable lexicon of terms for olfactory qualities, and investigate their semantics using a multi-method approach. In particular, we demonstrate a novel use of exemplar listing where – in addition to giving insights into the terms’ extensions – exemplar data is used to reveal the structure of the lexicon. Additionally, we use corpus data to provide complementary information on meaning and usage, thereby showing the advantage of multi-method approaches. Overall, the findings suggest smell lexica are not rara, and their distribution in the world’s languages goes beyond the stereotypical cases of languages spoken by small-scale societies.
Funding statement: These work was supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, (Funder Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003246, Grant Number: 277-70-011).
Abbreviations
- 1
first person
- 3
third person
- clf
classifier
- asp
aspect
- neg
negative
- nmlz
nominalizer
- pl
plural
- part
particle
- sg
singular
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research: NWO VICI grant “Human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture and biology” 277-70-011 (PI Majid). We thank Seth Phiriya for data collection and coding, Sasinee Khuankaew for help collecting data, Krittanon Thotsagool for critical discussions, and Yuma Ito for comments.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Smell terms are not rara: A semantic investigation of odor vocabulary in Thai
- Negation in Berber: Variation, evolution, and typology
- Acquisition of broken plural patterns by Jordanian children
- Preposition-drop in Greek: EPP-driven pseudo-incorporation
- The position of object pronouns in the German middlefield
- Changes in the productivity of word-formation patterns: Some methodological remarks
- Distributional properties of an agreement marker in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Smell terms are not rara: A semantic investigation of odor vocabulary in Thai
- Negation in Berber: Variation, evolution, and typology
- Acquisition of broken plural patterns by Jordanian children
- Preposition-drop in Greek: EPP-driven pseudo-incorporation
- The position of object pronouns in the German middlefield
- Changes in the productivity of word-formation patterns: Some methodological remarks
- Distributional properties of an agreement marker in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS)