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Smell terms are not rara: A semantic investigation of odor vocabulary in Thai

  • Ewelina Wnuk EMAIL logo , Rujiwan Laophairoj and Asifa Majid
Published/Copyright: February 19, 2020

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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Published Online: 2020-02-19
Published in Print: 2020-10-25

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