The Journal of Chinese Linguistics (Preprint)

© 2021 by the Journal of Chinese Linguistics. ISSN 0091-3723/ Bodily sensation and
embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese. By Zhong
et al. All rights reserved.

BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT: A CORPUS-

BASED STUDY OF GUSTATORY VOCABULARY IN
MANDARIN CHINESE 
Yin Zhong Chu-Ren Huang Sicong Dong
The Hong Kong The Hong Kong Harbin Institute of
Polytechnic University, Polytechnic University, Technology, Shenzhen,
Hong Kong Hong Kong Shenzhen

ABSTRACT
Embodiment has been the tenet of several linguistic theories accounting for
how language conceptualizes cognitive and bodily experiences. Studies on
linguistic synesthesia and sensory lexicon strengthened the embodiment
account by showing that the mapping patterns amongst sense modalities
likewise exhibited a tendency from the more embodied to the less
embodied. This paper reports a corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary
in Mandarin Chinese to explore the interaction between embodied senses
and conceptual embodiment. We first observed that the perception of là 辣
‘spicy’ and má 麻 ‘numbing’ was chemesthesis derived from a chemical
reaction from the body. In addition, the concept of taste was found capable
of being depicted by variegated non-taste lexical items from less embodied
sensory domains. This study posits that gustatory properties as abstract
cognitive categories are likely to be derived from more embodied senses,
yet when the quality of gustatory sensation is the focus, less embodied
senses can be adopted to modify it. Corroborated with other recent studies,

Acknowledgments This research work is supported by Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation

Research Grant sponsored by the National Taiwan Normal University and the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University (Project No.: RG012-D-16).

Sicong Dong (董思聪; corresponding author) [[email protected]]; T2-711B, School of

Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Nanshan,
Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2446-9730

1
2 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

this study underlines and clarifies the role of embodiment as a versatile

tool of linguistic conceptualization among multiple conceptual layers
instead of being a fixed set of conceptual objects to select from.

KEYWORDS
Embodiment Mandarin gustatory vocabulary Linguistic synesthesia
Sensory modality

1. INTRODUCTION
Human beings live by five senses to experience the world, namely,
visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile sensations, or more
commonly known as vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch senses.1 These
five sense modalities are established as both the traditional and the
scientifically conventionalized categories of basic human perception. How
human beings perceive the world through the five physiological senses and
how such perceptions are encoded in human language have received
constant scrutiny, yet they have not been studied with the same intensity.
Previous linguistic studies were voluminous on vision, notably on color
terms (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969; Wierzbicka 1990; Kay 2009). This can
be attributed to the dominance of vision in Western culture (e.g., Classen
1997; Levinson and Majid 2014), as well as among perceptual qualities
(e.g., Strik Lievers and Winter 2018). To bring in a slightly different
perspective, this paper primarily investigates how gustatory sensation, or
taste, is expressed in Mandarin Chinese, and its relationship with other
senses. We attempt to present a more distinctive and fine-grained picture
of how Chinese people discuss gustatory perception and its related
concepts with support from corpus data.
Tastes of food are traditionally categorized into wǔ-wèi 五味 ‘five
tastes; five flavors’ in Chinese culture: sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, and salty,
as exemplified in the classic text Lüshi Chunqiu 吕氏春秋 (Lü 2010, 279)2:

五味三材…调和之事，必以甘酸苦辛咸…
Wǔ wèi sān cái…tiáo hé zhī shì, bì yǐ gān suān kǔ xīn xián…
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 3

‘For the five tastes and the three ingredients…for the task of
harmonizing and blending, one must use sweet, sour, bitter,
spicy, and salty…’

Notwithstanding gān 甘 ‘sweet’ and xīn 辛 ‘spicy’ are superseded by tián

甜 ‘sweet’ and là 辣 ‘spicy’ in Modern Chinese over the years, the concept
of the five tastes is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Interestingly, modern
science shows that the basic five taste qualities able to be detected by the
gustatory sense only concern sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and umami 3
(Mouritsen and Styrbæk 2014), and spicy is merely considered one of the
chemesthesis, which is a coined term indicating the chemical sensitivity of
the skin and mucous membranes deriving primarily from the sensory
systems classically defined as touch, temperature, and pain (Green 1996;
2016). In addition, although gān 甘 as umami is widely documented and
commonly used in daily life, especially in the context of tea and other
drinks 4 (cf. Kaneko et al. 2006), it is not typically included in the
discussion of the five tastes in Modern Mandarin. Despite the incongruence
between the five traditional tastes perceived by Chinese people and the
basic taste senses recognized from a more scientific and rigorous
viewpoint, Wu (1989) did not elaborate on it and continued treating là 辣
‘spicy’ as one of the taste senses. Moreover, though some research
proposed that extensions of semantic meanings of the main gustatory
adjectives in Chinese might be attributed to the regularity of transfer among
senses (e.g., Jiang 2008; Pan and Zhang 2017), they lacked systematic and
theoretical grounds. In general, how taste is depicted, where the gustatory
sense stands amongst human senses, and how it interplays with other
sensory modalities as reflected by the real use of language are still under -
examined.
After embodiment cognition was proposed by Lakoff and Johnson
(1980, 1999), subsequent researches concerning language and human
senses substantially testified this theory and suggested that a more
embodied domain tends to transfer to a less embodied domain, our bodily
experience hence can be a primary source for the mapping from the more
concrete concepts to the more abstract concepts (Lakoff and Johnson 1980;
Lakoff 1987). Kövecses (2002) holds a similar view by claiming that the
human body is an ideal source domain for semantic extensions and
4 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

embodiment plays a key role in the emergence of metaphorical meaning in

languages and cultures worldwide. Grounded on the intertwined
connection between the human body and language, a revival of interest in
studying interrelationships among the five senses through language
received considerable attention, giving rise to linguistic synesthesia.
Synesthesia is derived from Greek syn- ‘with; together’ and aesthesis
‘sensation’, and it refers to the union of senses (cf. Shen and Eisenman
2008; Ronga et al. 2012). Generally speaking, linguistic synesthesia is
realized when the conception from one sensory modality modifies the
conception from other sensory domains. For instance, sweet in the phrase
sweet voice is deemed a synesthetic metaphor and is used to modify voice,
and the synesthetic directionality in such a phrase transfers from gustatory
sensation (i.e., sweet) to auditory sensation (i.e., voice). It has been attested
in many languages, including English and Chinese, that linguistic
synesthesia normally follows a particular directionality, i.e., tactile and
gustatory senses are considered the source domains that most frequently
transfer to target domains of olfactory, visual and auditory senses (e.g.,
Ullmann 1957; Williams 1976; Zhao, Huang, and Long 2018; Strik Lievers
2015; Strik Lievers, Huang, and Xiong 2021). Such synesthetic
directionality is claimed to be predicted by the universal notion of
embodiment, i.e., from more embodied to less embodied concepts
depending on their involvement and closeness of bodily contact (e.g., Shen
1997; Shen and Eisenman 2008). Whereas in recent linguistic synesthesia
studies, especially in Mandarin Chinese, it has exhibited a more intricate
mapping tendency (Huang and Xiong 2019; Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens
2019; Zhao, Xiong, and Huang 2019, among others). It is suggested that
the directionality among sensory domains is not completely a linear model
as identified in Ullmann (1957) nor a linear-hierarchical model as
suggested by William (1976). Rather, it can be “unidirectional” (e.g., touch
is always found transferring to hearing but not the other way around),
“biased-directional” (two sensory domains can transfer to each other with
a clear dominant mapping, e.g., vision exhibits a much higher
transferability rate to touch than touch to vision), and “bi-directional” (two
sensory domains can transfer to each other without a clear dominant
mapping, e.g., between touch and taste) (Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens 2019).
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 5

Given the doubt cast by the above studies on the long-standing five
tastes taxonomy and the embodiment-oriented explanation of linguistic
synesthesia in Mandarin Chinese, the relationship between perception and
language merits a closer look. This paper examines real-life uses of taste-
related concepts on the biological basis of gustatory sensation. Given the
standard account of gustatory sense as the second most embodied sense
after tactile sense (cf. Williams 1976; Zhao, Huang, and Long 2018; Zhao,
Xiong, and Huang 2019), we try to explore the following three research
questions:

a. Does Mandarin Chinese treat chemesthesis-based tastes, e.g.,

spicy (xīn 辛 and là 辣), as similar or different to other basic
tastes?
b. Is the standard taxonomy of five tastes adequate for representing
a full range of gustatory properties in the use of daily language
in Chinese?
c. Does gustatory sense interact differently with more embodied
sense (i.e., tactile sense) and less embodied senses (i.e.,
olfactory, auditory, and visual senses) in Mandarin Chinese?

2. BACKGROUND
2.1 Là 辣‘spicy’ as a Non-taste Taste
As mentioned in the above section, xīn 辛 and the later use of là 辣
are pertinent to the taste sensation in Mandarin Chinese. According to the
experimental results in Chen et al. (2019), the gustatory sense is rated by
Mandarin speakers the most dominant for là 辣 ‘spicy’ (with the score of
4.97, compared to 2.40 through smell, 1.41 via vision, 0.83 by touch, and
0.12 via hearing; the rating system is from 0 to 5). This significant score
disparity indicates that là 辣 ‘spicy’ is perceived as taste rather than any
other sense in Mandarin Chinese. Moreover, in the series of linguistic
synesthesia studies in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Zhao, Huang, and Long
2018; Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens 2019; Zhao, Xiong, and Huang 2019), là
辣 ‘spicy’ is treated as belonging to the gustatory sense. Their argument
mainly stemmed from Archaic Chinese5, such as the examples illustrated
previously in Lüshi Chunqiu and the Xunzi 荀子6:
6 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

甘苦咸淡辛酸奇味，以口异。
Gān kǔ xián dàn xīn suān qí wèi, yǐ kǒu yì.
‘various tastes, such as sweetness, bitterness, the salty taste,
the mild taste, the hot taste, sourness, are differentiated by
the mouth.’
(Zhao, Huang, and Long, 2018, 1175).

Since là 辣 ‘spicy’ is developed from xīn 辛 and employs xīn 辛 as its

radical (the semantic component of a Chinese character), both xīn 辛 and
là 辣 were categorized as taste sense in their studies.
But it is also evident that xīn 辛 or là 辣 are not limited to the taste
sense, or strictly speaking, they are not taste senses originally. Two main
accounts support this argument. First, the Mandarin writing system is
considered semantic-based orthography, suggesting the etymology of
Chinese characters can be deduced from the semantic and/or phonetic
components, and that the Chinese orthographical system encodes certain
conceptual properties (Huang and Hsieh 2015; Chen et al. 2019). Based on
the Shuowenjiezi 说文解字 (Xu 1963, 309), xīn 辛 is originally related with
tòng 痛 ‘hurt’. In addition, the original character of zuì 辠 ‘crime;
punishment’ contains xīn 辛 as a radical (but not the modern form zuì 罪7),
indicating that the basic meaning of xīn 辛 is related with bodily
punishment. Thus, the later use of xīn 辛 and its successor là 辣 in the
gustatory sensation is presumably through the severe pain associated with
the bodily feelings caused by xīn 辛, analogous to feelings perceived via
the oral cavity. The second account is from the neurological perspective.
As mentioned previously, this spicy perception is something that does not
correspond to any taste receptors; instead, it is a common chemical sense,
which is a kind of sense as distinct and well defined as smell or taste
(Parker 1912), or currently more often referred to as chemesthesis. If that
is the case, either from the etymology of this word or from the biological
account, the source domain of xīn 辛 and là 辣 in the synesthetic transfer
is not from the gustatory sense but is derived from the tactile sense.
Apart from the feeling of xīn 辛 and là 辣, another feeling má 麻
‘numbing’ caused by Sichuan Pepper (huājiāo 花椒), is also deemed one
of the tastes in Chinese. Má 麻 ‘numbing’ is found frequently coordinated
with sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy when searching in Google (accessed 21
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 7

May 2020, with hits indicated in the parentheses): suān-tián-kǔ-má-là 酸

甜苦麻辣 (74,900), suān-tián-kǔ-là-má 酸甜苦辣麻 (55,400), tián-suān-
kǔ-là-má 甜 酸 苦 辣 麻 (4,130), tián-suān-kǔ-má-là 甜酸 苦 麻 辣 (280).
However, the numbing feeling caused by Sichuan pepper is not a taste
either, but rather tactile and thermal sensitivity (Bryant and Mezine 1999).
The use of Sichuan pepper can be traced to the Shijing 诗经 (11th−7th
century BCE). It was one of the main spices that ancient Chinese people
used to produce the xīn 辛 flavor, while the use of chili pepper came much
later, with the first written record in the latter part of the Ming dynasty
(1368−1644 CE) (Zhao 2006, 346−350), hence xīn 辛 might probably also
denote the numbing feeling in Classical Chinese. This also explains why
we choose spicy, but not hot, to interpret xīn 辛 and là 辣. In Classical
Chinese, the flavors of pepper, ginger, onion, and garlic can all be
described as xīn 辛; while in Mandarin Chinese, we also use là 辣 to depict
the pungent feelings caused by such spices. The hot chili pepper, therefore,
is just one of the spices that contribute to the flavor of là 辣, although the
most predominant one.
In general, the spicy and numbing feelings caused by chili pepper
and Sichuan pepper, traditionally known as taste senses in China, shall
belong to chemesthesis, which, together with taste, smell, and mouthfeel,
contributes to the integrated sensory impressions evoked in the oral cavity
(Mouritsen and Styrbæk 2014). It hence triggers our desire to find out, even
though these bodily sensations are deemed tastes in Chinese, how Chinese
people would discuss their actual feelings when they perceive spicy and
numbing flavors in the food.

2.2 Wèi 味 ‘taste’ as a Non-taste Taste

In The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, the literal meaning of wèi
味 is defined as “the gustatory sensation produced in the tongue by contact
with a substance” and “the olfactory sensation produced in the nose by
contact with a substance” (Dictionary Editing Office 2016, 1359−1360),
indicating its inseparability from the gustatory and olfactory sensations. On
the other hand, the original meaning of wèi 味 is elaborated as zīwèi 滋味
‘flavor’ in Shuowenjiezi (Xu 1963, 31), and the following sentence
extracted from Lüshi Chunqiu (Lü 2010, 305) best explains what zīwèi 滋
味 ‘flavor’ means to Chinese people:
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若人之于滋味，无不说甘脆…
Ruò rén zhī yú zīwèi, wú bù shuō gān cuì...
‘Speaking of flavors, everyone likes what is sweet and
crisp…’

Sweet is what human beings can sense through the taste receptor cells found
in the taste buds on the tongue, whereas there is no such taste receptor to
account for crisp. The etymology of cuì 脆 ‘crisp’ is from cuì 脃, referring
to small, tender, and fragile things in the flesh (Xu 1963, 90). It hints that
the original understanding of wèi 味 might involve both gustatory and
tactile sensations.
It turned out that wèi 味 was instantiated as an “umbrella term” that
went beyond the gustatory sensation to embrace all the sensory words in
the early Chinese Buddhist texts (Xiong and Huang 2016). For example,
wèi 味 in the  Āgamas 阿含经 employs lexical items from all five senses
to produce Buddhist expressions, i.e., sèwèi 色味 ‘form-taste’, shēngwèi
声味 ‘sound-taste’, xiāngwèi 香味 ‘smell-taste’, and chùwèi 触味 ‘touch-
taste’. In addition, when wèi 味 ‘taste’ is collocated with zhuó 着 ‘attach’
to form a verb wèizhuó 味着 ‘attach to; attract’, it connects internal organs
with external objects:

眼味着色…耳味着声…鼻味着香…舌味着味…身味着触…
yǎn wèizhuó sè…ěr wèizhuó shēng…bí wèizhuó xiāng…shé
wèizhuó wèi…shēn wèizhuó chù…
‘eye-taste attracts forms…ear-taste attracts sounds…nose-
taste attracts smell…tongue-taste attracts taste…body-taste
attracts tangibles…’
(Xiong and Huang 2016; Huang and Xiong 2019)

The ability of the gustatory sensation to transfer to other sensory modalities,

as shown in the Buddhist texts, suggests that taste is probably the most
accessible and culturally dependent sense to some extent (Huang and
Xiong 2019).
This fuzzy meaning of wèi 味 or wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ in
Chinese is tantamount to the loose and interchangeable use of taste and
flavor in English. Scientifically and strictly speaking, taste refers to the
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 9

recognition of substances by the taste buds, which relates to gustatory

sensation only; while flavor is multimodal and engages a combination of
all five senses (e.g., Spence 2016; Mouritsen and Styrbæk 2017), and is
especially influenced by “tactile, thermal, painful, and/or kinesthetic
effects” (Klosse 2014, 22; Spence 2016, 374). It is also noted in Rhee and
Koo (2017) that lexicalization of taste vocabulary in Korean goes beyond
the “primary taste category” that is predominantly originated in the
gustatory sensation but recruits extensive tactile-related and auditory terms
(i.e., onomatopoeia) to denote tastes and flavors of food. Given the only
word wèi 味 or wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ in Chinese accounting for both
taste and flavor, it further suggests that linguistically speaking, wèi 味 or
wèidào 味 道 ‘taste; smell’ is not limited to gustatory sensation, other
sensory descriptors may also contribute to the understanding of tastes and
flavors in Chinese.

3. METHOD AND DATA

Following the dictum of “you shall know a word by the company it
keeps” (Firth 1957, 11; Yang 2019), we focus on the collocations and
concordances of the key concepts we target. All the data and sentence
examples presented in this paper, unless otherwise specified, were
extracted from a Chinese online corpus, Chinese Web 2017 (zhTenTen11)
in the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014).8 This is an annotated web-
based corpus consisting of a total of 17 billion Simplified Chinese script
texts. It is considered the largest and latest tagged corpus to the best of our
knowledge, so a comprehensive and contemporary epistemology of taste-
related expressions can be sketched.
Moreover, a corpus containing food reviews specifically on hotpot
restaurants was built to cater for the analysis of chemesthesis. First, five
hotpot (huǒguō 火锅) and five skewer hotpot (chuànchuànxiāng 串串香)
restaurants in each of the two cities, Chongqing and Chengdu, i.e., 20 in
total, were chosen from the largest restaurant review website in Mainland
China, Dazhong Dianping 大 众 点 评 . 9 This is because Chongqing and
Chengdu are the two biggest cities in the core region of Sichuan cuisine
which is unique for its spicy and numbing flavor, and the two kinds of
chosen food contain the most concentrated spicy and numbing flavor
amongst dishes served in Sichuan cuisine restaurants. The shops were
10 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

listed in descending order according to the rates of positive comments.

Only comments under the category of Positive Review were collected since
this category has accounted for around 80% of total comments generally. 10
After the restaurants and comments were decided, a third-party web
crawler Bazhuayu 八爪鱼 (Octoparse)11 was used to automatically scrape
the data from the website. With repeated comments excluded, a total of
9,141 comments were collected in June 2018. A tagged corpus was later
compiled in the Sketch Engine, consisting of 1,255,649 Chinese characters,
723,502 words, and 866,968 tokens, named HOTPOT corpus in short, in
what follows.
The Word Sketch function in the Sketch Engine will be adopted as
the primary tool in this study. A Word Sketch portrays the grammatical and
collocational behavior of a word by sorting with the logDice score. 12 Some
other functions, e.g., Concordance, Word Sketch Difference, and
Keywords, will also be used to scrutinize the data further. Concordance
tells the context where a keyword would appear; Word Sketch Difference
is utilized to compare the use of two different lemmas via their collocates;
while Keywords is used to identify individual words (tokens) which appear
more frequently in the target corpus HOTPOT corpus than in the reference
corpus Chinese Web 2017 (zhTenTen11).

4. PERCEPTION OF SPICY AND NUMBING

In this section, the HOTPOT corpus was mainly consulted to
account for the perception of spicy and numbing. Contrary to the common
belief among Chinese people, our data indicate that the spicy and numbing
flavors are perceived more toward chemesthesis than the taste sense. This
finding is supported by the following subsections.

4.1 Collocations with Hurt and Irritation

First, the words for spicy and numbing, i.e., làwèi 辣味 ‘spicy taste’
and má 麻 ‘numbing’, yielded a high score of collocation with words
referring to hurt and irritating, as shown in the first two rows in Table 1.
The words in the remaining rows suggest that verbs comprising different
kinds of hurt or irritation can affect various body parts. For instance, chilies
in the hotpot can shāng 伤 ‘hurt’, shāo 烧 ‘burn’ or xūn 熏 ‘smoke’, and
qiàng 呛 ‘irritate’ the stomach, throat, mouth, nose; while the spicy and
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 11

numbing flavors can be cìjī 刺激 ‘irritating’. The collocations indicate that

Chinese people realize spicy and numbing are associated with chemesthesis,
and they can use language to explicitly describe such feelings.

Table 1 Collocations with hurt and irritation

Keyword Collocated Words logDice score
chòng 冲 ‘pungent’ 11.67
làwèi 辣味 ‘spicy taste’
shāo-xīn 烧心 ‘heart-burning’ 11.67
má 麻 ‘numbing’ cìjī 刺激 ‘irritating’ 9.41
wèi 胃‘stomach’ 11.19
shāng 伤 ‘hurt’
sǎngzi 嗓子 ‘throat’ 10.82
wèi 胃 ‘stomach’ 10.82
liǎn 脸 ‘face’ 10.14
shāo 烧 ‘burn’
zuǐ 嘴 ‘mouth’ 9.27
dùzi 肚子 ‘belly’ 9.06
sǎngzi 嗓子 ‘throat’ 12.29
qiàng 呛 ‘irritate’
bízi 鼻子 ‘nose’ 11.83
chòng 冲 ‘pungent’ bí 鼻 ‘nose’ 10.82
shuǎnglà 爽辣 ‘refreshingly
12.68
spicy’
làdù 辣度 ‘spicy degree’ 9.75
cìjī 刺激 ‘irritating’
má 麻 ‘numbing’ 9.41
là 辣 ‘spicy’ 9.24
málà 麻辣 ‘numbing and spicy’ 5.23
làyóu 辣油 ‘chili oil’ 12.68
xūn 熏 ‘smoke’
làjiāo 辣椒 ‘chili pepper’ 8.91

4.2 Collocations with Acceptance, Tolerance, and Emotion

When analyzing the predicates collocated with a series of spicy and
numbing related items, i.e., là 辣 ‘spicy’, làwèi 辣味 ‘spicy taste’, làdù 辣
度 ‘spicy degree’, làjiāo 辣椒 ‘chili pepper’, má 麻 ‘numbing’, and huājiāo
花椒 ‘Sichuan pepper’, four main categories were identified, as demonstrated
in Table 2.
The first category of predicates contains verbs related to acceptance
of spicy and numbing flavors, e.g., néng-chī 能吃 ‘able to eat’ and jiēshòu
接受 ‘accept’. In fact, when we use wàidì 外地 ‘non-local’ as the keyword,
12 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

we found that it is frequently collocated with chī-bu-dé-là 吃 不 得 辣

‘cannot eat spicy’, wēilà 微辣 ‘slightly spicy’, and shìhé 适合 ‘suitable’,
showing non-local people may not be used to the strong spicy and numbing
flavors, and have to choose a suitable degree which is frequently slightly
spicy.
The second category is related to tolerance, involving verbs related
to the action or the ability to tolerate such flavors, including rěn 忍
‘tolerate’, chéngshòu 承受 ‘bear’, and shòu-de-liǎo 受得了 ‘can bear’.
The third category of verbs indicates reducing the degree of intense
feelings, such as huǎnjiě 缓解 ‘relieve’, shāo-jiǎn 稍减 ‘slightly reduce’,
and jiǎnhuǎn 减缓 ‘slow down’. These verbs are normally used when
diners have to consume other things to soothe the burning or irritating
feeling caused by spiciness. These usually are sweet or cold foods. W hen
the Keywords function was applied to compare our current corpus with the
reference corpus, bīngfěn 冰粉 ‘icy jelly’, cíbā 糍粑 ‘glutinous rice cake’,
hóngtáng-cíbā 红糖糍粑 ‘brown sugar glutinous rice cake’, yín’ěrtāng 银
耳汤 ‘tremella soup’, etc. were found. More examples can be seen in the
words collocated with jiě-là 解辣 ‘to relieve spiciness’, including dòunǎi
豆奶 ‘soy milk’, suānméi(tāng) 酸梅(汤) ‘sour plum (soup)’, tāngyuán 汤
圆 ‘glutinous rice ball’, 13 hóngtáng 红糖 ‘brown sugar’, liángshuǎng 凉爽
‘cool’, bīng-bīng-liáng-liáng 冰冰凉凉 ‘icy and cool’, bīng 冰 ‘ice’, and
tián 甜 ‘sweet’. This phenomenon could be explained by the findings that
the burning sensation produced by capsaicin, the primary pungent
compound in chili pepper, can be reduced by lower temperatures and
sweetness (Prescott and Stevenson 1995; Mouritsen and Styrbæk 2017,
20).
Last but not least, some words that imply emotions are found
frequently collocated with the perception of spiciness. For instance, people
are afraid of or worried about something being too spicy by using pà 怕
‘fear’ and dānxīn 担心 ‘worry’, while gǎn 敢 ‘dare’ and bù-pà 不怕 ‘not
scared of’ are used to show the association with the fear/dare emotion with
spiciness. In addition, people tend to use là-kū spicy-cry 辣哭 ‘too spicy’,
là-sǐ (rén) spicy-die (people) 辣死( 人) ‘too spicy’ to express extreme
feelings.
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 13

Table 2 Collocations with acceptance, tolerance, and emotion

logDice
Keyword Collocated Words
score
jiě 解 ‘relieve’ 11.56
là 辣 ‘spicy’ pà 怕 ‘fear’ 9.71
kū 哭 ‘cry’ 9.59
sǐ 死 ‘die’ 9.22
néng-chī 能吃 ‘able to eat’ 7.99
jiě-jiě 解解 ‘relieve’ 7.7
sǐ (rén) 死(人) ‘die’ 7.66
shāo-jiǎn 稍减 ‘slightly reduce’ 9.19
huǎnjiě 缓解 ‘relieve’ 9.19
làwèi 辣味 ‘spicy taste’
jiě-jiě 解解 ‘relieve’ 9.14
jiēshòu 接受 ‘accept’ 9.1
huǎnchōng 缓冲 ‘buffer’ 10.68
chéngshòu 承受 ‘bear’ 10.68
jiēshòu 接受 ‘accept’ 10.09
làdù 辣度 ‘spicy degree’ jiǎnhuǎn 减缓 ‘slow down’ 9.41
rěn 忍 ‘bear’ 9.38
tiǎozhàn 挑战 ‘challenge’ 9.27
shòu-de-liǎo 受得了 ‘can bear’ 8.81
làjiāo 辣椒 ‘chili pepper’ gǎn 敢 ‘dare’ 8.43
guàn 惯 ‘get used to’ 10.51
cìjī 刺激 ‘irritating’ 9.41
má 麻 ‘numbing’ bù-pà 不怕 ‘not scared of’ 9.16
tang-hàn 淌汗 ‘sweat’ 8.93
dǎozhì 导致 ‘lead to’ 8.82
huājiāo 花椒 ‘Sichuan pepper’ jiēshòu 接受 ‘accept’ 8.55

4.3 Collocations with Latency of Onset and Time Course

In addition, it is intriguing that people think the degree or intensity
of spicy and numbing foods is much higher at the later stage of dining, as
presented in Table 3. The collocations showed that the flavors of spicy and
numbing foods are not so strong at the beginning, but the more you eat, the
more intense the taste will become, and subsequently, it will slowly come
out, appear and release. The reason may be that capsaicin in chilies has a
slow onset speed and the spiciness persists for prolonged periods, and
successive capsaicin stimuli at short intervals will continue to produce
14 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

increasing irritation in the burning intensity, which is a phenomenon

known as “sensitization” (Prescott and Stevenson 1995).
As shown in the previous section, some people may be not used to
spicy and numbing flavors, but this is something they can learn to adapt to.
Once they can accept and tolerate it, they will become accustomed to it.
This phenomenon may be due to “desensitization”, which occurs when the
interval of stimulation is relatively long, and subsequent stimuli of
capsaicin are perceived as less intense. Another possibility proposed by
Prescott and Stevenson (1995) is that the greater range of sensation
intensities experienced by frequent chili users may make them judge
capsaicin burn as less intense than infrequent users.

Table 3 Collocations concerning the latency of onset and time course

Keyword Collocated Words logDice score
chūlai 出来 ‘come out’ 9.93
hòumian 后面 ‘later’ 9.93
làwèi 辣味
mànmàn 慢慢 ‘slowly’ 9.35
‘spicy taste’
xiǎnxiàn 显现 ‘appear’ 9.12
shìfàng 释放 ‘release’ 9.04
là 辣 ‘spicy’ kāishǐ 开始 ‘beginning’ 7.92
làdù 辣度
xiǎnlù 显露 ‘appear’ 8.81
‘spicy degree’
máwèi 麻味 biàn-zhòng 变重 ‘become intense’ 12.68
‘numbing taste’ hòumian 后面 ‘later’ 9.27
má 麻 ‘numbing’ hòumian 后面 ‘later’ 8.01

To sum up, with the collocations of items related to là 辣 ‘spicy’

and má 麻 ‘numbing’ identified in the above sections, it is confirmed that
spicy and numbing feelings are closely related to chemesthesis rather than
taste sense in the use of language. This is mainly manifested by the
irritation and hurting ability carried by the spiciness, which is not shared
by other true qualities of taste sense. Apart from that, when spicy and
numbing foods are served in certain quantities, intense feelings need to be
relieved. Moreover, spicy and numbing feelings are hard to tolerate,
courage is thus required if people are not used to these feelings, and
negative emotions such as fear will be expressed. It is, however, not to say
all the words listed above are not acceptable for genuine taste-related items.
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 15

For example, those words expressing one’s preference (e.g., pà-chī-tián 怕

吃甜 ‘afraid of eating sweetness’14) and extremity (e.g., tián-sǐ-le 甜死了
‘too sweet’) are also acceptable for the gustatory qualities. Note that some
of the verbs indicating endurance can also collocate with one of the genuine
taste senses, kǔ 苦 ‘bitter’, such as bǎoshòu 饱受 ‘suffer’, rěnshòu 忍受
‘bear’, so on and so forth. However, in the corresponding contexts, kǔ 苦
‘bitter’ normally elicits its metaphorical meaning of suffering in life and
does not literally refer to the bona fide gustatory sensation.

5. PERCEPTION OF TASTE
As mentioned in Section 1, the five traditional tastes, i.e., suān 酸
‘sour’, tián 甜 ‘sweet’, kǔ 苦 ‘bitter’, là 辣 ‘spicy’, and xián 咸 ‘salty’
constitute the major qualities of taste sense in Chinese culture, even though
là 辣 ‘spicy’ is testified being treated as chemesthesis rather than the
gustatory sensation in the preceding section. In this section, we would like
to check whether the concept of wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ strictly or
loosely follows its definition with the data presented in the corpus Chinese
Web 2017 (zhTenTen11). It is noted that the vocabulary being categorized
into different sensory domains mainly follows two lines: (1) if their
original meaning is pertinent to that sense (cf. Zhao, Xiong, and Huang
2019); for example, even though měi 美 ‘beautiful’ is commonly used in
the visual domain in modern Chinese, its etymology originated in the taste
sense (denoting the delicious taste of a big sheep 15) made it a gustatory
adjective in Zhao, Xiong, and Huang (2019); (2) if the perception is
deemed dominating in that word (cf. Chen et al. 2019), for instance, the
ratings received by the adjective nóngliè 浓烈 ‘of intense taste-scorching’
in gustatory and olfactory senses were extremely close to each other - 4.48
versus 4.40, we had no choice but to choose the more dominant one that
won out by a tiny margin. Other words not listed in Zhao, Xiong, and
Huang (2019) or Chen et al. (2019) will mainly be categorized in terms of
their original meanings that can be traced in Shuowenjiezi (Xu 1963) or
their frequent usages as demonstrated by the corpus data.

5.1 Collocations with Gustatory and Olfactory Vocabulary

Since the meaning of wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ comprises both the
gustatory and olfactory senses according to the definition in the dictionary,
16 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

the collocations that fall into these two categories will be examined first.
For our current purpose, we limited the grammatical relations to the words
that wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ modifies and the modifiers of wèidào 味道
‘taste; smell’, which are mostly adjectives. Following an exhaustive search
for collocations in the two grammatical relations with all irrelevant words
excluded, 55 gustatory related and 19 olfactory related items were
identified, as presented in Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Gustatory related items to describe wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’

Gustatory related logDice Gustatory related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
tián(tián de) 甜(甜 qīngdàn 清淡 ‘of
1 9.02 29 5.4
的) ‘sweet’ light taste’
dàn(dàn de) 淡(淡的) xiāngcuì 香脆
2 8.19 30 5.4
‘of mild taste’ ‘fragrant and crispy’
xiāngtián 香甜 là(là de) 辣(辣的)
3 7.83 31 5.14
‘fragrant and sweet’ ‘spicy’
nóngyù 浓郁 ‘of xiándàn 咸淡
4 7.58 32 5.04
intense taste-dense ‘degree of saltiness’
nóngliè 浓烈 ‘of
gānxiāng 甘香
5 intense taste- 7.38 33 5
‘sweet and fragrant’
scorching’
suān(suān de) 酸(酸 kǔsè 苦涩 ‘bitter and
6 7.29 34 4.72
的) ‘sour’ astringent’
gānkǔ 甘苦
nóngxiāng 浓香
7 7.19 35 ‘sweetness and 4.54
‘aroma’
bitterness’
xiāngsū 香酥
málà 麻辣 ‘spicy and
8 6.95 36 ‘appetizing and 4.45
numbing’
crispy’
nóngzhòng 浓重 ‘of xiánxiāng 咸香
9 6.72 37 4.44
intense taste-heavy’ ‘salty and fragrant’
guǎdàn 寡淡 ‘of mild xiānchún 鲜醇
10 6.54 38 4.33
taste’ ‘savory and mellow’
tiánzīzī 甜滋滋
11 xián 咸 ‘salty’ 6.28 39 4.09
‘pleasantly sweet’
12 gāntián 甘甜 ‘sweet’ 6.23 40 yóunì 油腻 ‘oily’ 4.08
suānsè 酸涩 ‘sour
13 xiānglà 香辣 ‘spicy’ 6.17 41 4.06
and astringent’
nónghòu 浓厚 ‘of suānlà 酸辣 ‘sour
14 6.14 42 3.95
intense taste-thick’ and spicy’
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 17

Table 4 (continued)
Gustatory related logDice Gustatory related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
xiāngtián-kěkǒu 香
tiánxiāng 甜香
15 6.06 43 甜可口 ‘sweet and 3.94
‘sweet and fragrant’
tasty’
qīngtián 清甜 shuǎngkǒu 爽口
16 6.02 44 3.93
‘limpid-sweet’ ‘tasty and refreshing’
jí xiān 极鲜
17 6.01 45 sè 涩 ‘astringent’ 3.53
‘extremely savory’
chúnhòu 醇厚 ‘of
suānshuǎng 酸爽
18 intense taste of wine- 5.99 46 3.45
‘sour and tasty’
thick’
tiánsuān 甜酸 ‘sweet
19 5.97 47 má 麻 ‘numbing’ 3.43
and sour’
xiánxiān 咸鲜 ‘salty
20 5.85 48 gānliè 甘冽 ‘sweet’ 3.36
and savory’
tiánnì 甜腻 ‘sweet huǒlà 火辣 ‘hot and
21 5.81 49 2.98
and cloying’ spicy’
chúnhé 醇和 ‘mellow chúnměi 醇美
22 5.57 50 2.69
and mild’ ‘mellow and tasty’
xiānnèn 鲜嫩 ‘savory
23 nì 腻 ‘fatty; greasy’ 5.55 51 2.61
and tender’
suānliūliū 酸溜溜 gānměi 甘美 ‘sweet
24 5.53 52 2.53
‘sour’ and tasty’
chúnxiāng 醇香/
25/ xiāngchún 香醇 tiánrùn 甜润 ‘sweet
5.51 53 2.17
26 ‘mellow and and moist’
fragrant’
suāntián 酸甜 ‘sour féiměi 肥美 ‘fatty
27 5.51 54 2.13
and sweet’ and tasty’
gānchún 甘醇 ‘sweet
28 kǔ 苦 ‘bitter’ 5.42 55 and intense taste of 2.06
wine’

Most of the gustatory-related words adopt morphemes that are

categorized as gustatory adjectives in Zhao, Huang, and Long (2018) and
Zhao, Xiong, and Huang (2019), e.g., tián 甜 ‘sweet’, dàn 淡 ‘of mild taste’,
nóng 浓 ‘of intense taste’, suān 酸 ‘sour’, xián 咸 ‘salty’, gān 甘 ‘sweet’,
xiān 鲜 ‘savory’, chún 醇 ‘intense taste (of wine)’, nì 腻 ‘fatty; greasy’, kǔ
苦 ‘bitter’, and měi 美 ‘tasty’. One noticeable phenomenon is that these
monosyllabic morphemes can be freely compounded to describe certain
preferable tastes and flavors. In addition to these words that rigorously
18 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

pertain to the gustatory sensation, morphemes from other sensory domains

also contribute to building the gustatory vocabulary, especially the
recurring olfactory item xiāng 香 ‘fragrant’. This word initially portrays
aroma and fragrance; but in Chen et al.’s (2019) ratings, although xiāng 香
‘fragrant’ is mainly perceived by the olfactory sense (scored 4.84),
gustatory perception shows a very competitive score of 4.32. In fact,
gustatory and olfactory perceptions demonstrated a strong positive
correlation in their ratings of the lexical items, and this can be partly
explained by the neurological fact that the olfactory receptors can also be
stimulated when food is tasted in the mouth (Spence, Auvray, and Smith
2014). Moreover, tactile-dominant adjectives (e.g., zhòng 重 ‘heavy’, cuì
脆 ‘crisp’, sū 酥 ‘crisp; flaky’, rùn 润 ‘moist’, and nèn 嫩 ‘tender’) and
visual-dominant adjectives (e.g., hòu 厚 ‘thick’, qīng 清 ‘limpid’, and féi
肥 ‘fat’) also participated in constituting gustatory-related items.

Table 5 Olfactory related items to describe wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’

Olfactory related logDice Olfactory related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
qīngxiāng 清香 ‘faint yānxūn 烟熏
1 9.56 11 5.46
scent’ ‘smoky’
2 cìbí 刺鼻 ‘pungent’ 9.42 12 chòng 冲 ‘pungent’ 5.07
shāo-jiāo 烧焦 qiàngbí 呛鼻
3 7.86 13 4.93
‘scorched’ ‘pungent’
fāngxiāng 芳香 èchòu 恶臭
4 7.21 14 4.85
‘aromatic’ ‘stinking’
qiàngrén 呛人 xīnxiāng 馨香
5 6.26 15 4.78
‘pungent’ ‘fragrant’
xiāngpēnpēn 香喷喷 xīngchòu 腥臭
6 ‘sweet-smelling; 6.18 16 ‘fishy-smell and 4.3
savory’ stinking’
fēnfāng 芬芳 suānchòu 酸臭
7 5.98 17 3.37
‘fragrant’ ‘acidic and stinking’
xiāng(xiāng de) 香
jiāohú 焦糊
8 (香的) ‘fragrant; 5.94 18 2.69
‘scorched and burnt’
savory’
xiāngnóng 香浓 xīnxiāng 辛香 ‘spicy
9 5.75 19 2.69
‘fragrant’ and fragrant’
fùyù 馥郁 ‘strong
10 5.57
fragrance’
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 19

In terms of olfactory-related items, most of them denote olfactory

qualities, i.e., xiāng 香 ‘fragrant’ and chòu 臭 ‘stinking’ (cf. Table 5).
Predicates related to irritation were also identified, all of them refer to
pungent smells, for example, cìbí 刺鼻 ‘pungent’, qiàngbí 呛鼻 ‘pungent’,
and chòng 冲 ‘pungent’. Note that jiāo 焦 ‘scorched’ was rated as gustatory
dominant in Chen et al. (2019), but in the corpus, we noticed that jiāowèi
焦味 ‘scorched and burnt smell’ and also húwèi 糊味 ‘burnt smell’ could
only collocate with wén-dào 闻到 ‘smell’ (284 instances) instead of cháng-
dào 尝到 ‘taste’ (0 instance). Therefore, these two words are categorized
as olfactory words here.
That gustatory- and olfactory- related items used to describe wèidào
味道 ‘taste; smell’ suggest that even though at the lexical level, they are
mainly referring to gustation and olfaction; at the sub-lexical level (e.g.,
root morphemes), there exists a considerable number of synesthetic
transfers in which firstly, gustatory and olfactory senses transfer to each
other; and secondly, lexical items rooted in tactile and visual sensations
engage in forming gustatory concepts as well.

5.2 Collocations with Tactile Vocabulary

15 lexical items related to the tactile sense were found in the
descriptions of wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’, as exhibited in Table 6. As
briefly raised in Section 5.1, tactile adjectives play a part in building up
gustatory items, while the additional phrases presented in this section
further affirms that the tactile sense, deemed the most embodied sense,
frequently gives rise to less embodied concepts.

Table 6 Tactile related items to describe wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’

Tactile related logDice Tactile related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
qīnglěng 清冷
1 zhòng 重 ‘heavy’ 7.88 9 3.21
‘chilly’
shīlùlù 湿漉漉
2 cháoshī 潮湿 ‘moist’ 5.29 10 2.99
‘wet’
ruǎnnuò 软糯 liángshuǎng 凉爽
3 4.28 11 2.54
‘soft and fluffy’ ‘cool’
shuǎnghuá 爽滑 rùnhuá 润滑
4 3.86 12 2.53
‘refreshing and slippery’ ‘moist and slippery’
20 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

Table 6 (continued)
Tactile related logDice Tactile related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
bīngliáng 冰凉
5 wēnhé 温和 ‘warm’ 3.75 13 2.48
‘icy cold’
6 cìjī 刺激 ‘irritating’ 3.56 14 gānzào 干燥 ‘dry’ 2.44
róuhuá 柔滑
7 shīrùn 湿润 ‘moist’ 3.54 15 1.5
‘soft and smooth’
xìnì 细腻 ‘fine and
8 3.38
smooth’

Neurological science corroborates that tactile receptors all over our

body are mainly split into four categories, including “mechanoreceptor”
picking up sensations such as pressure, vibration, and texture;
“thermoreceptor” concerning temperature such as hot and cold;
“nociceptor” aka pain receptor for perceiving pains; and “proprioceptor”,
which is the deep pressure sense felt by muscles, tendons, and joints when
we make movements (Popova 2005). When wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ is
described, it is found that texture and temperature-related vocabulary are
mainly adopted. For example, wēnhé 温和 ‘warm’ and liángshuǎng 凉爽
‘cool’ are to describe certain preferred temperature, i.e., neither too hot nor
too cold, it is therefore used to express mild and suitable taste, as
exemplified in the following instances (1) and (2):

(1) 奶酪温和的味道可以中和一下辣味。
Nǎilào wēnhé de wèidào kěyǐ zhōnghé yīxià làwèi.
cheese warm DE taste can balance once spicy-taste
‘The mild taste of cheese can balance the spicy taste.’
(2) 夏季特有的豆面，其香喷喷又凉爽的味道绝对是美味。
Xiàjì tèyǒu de dòumiàn, qí xiāngpēnpēn yòu
summer exclusive-have DE bean-noodle it savory and
liángshuǎng de wèidào juéduì shì měiwèi.
cool DE taste absolutely is tasty
‘The bean noodle exclusively for summer is absolutely tasty with its
delicious and cool taste.’

In addition, items related to texture, such as ruǎnnuò 软糯 ‘soft and

fluffy’, shuǎnghuá 爽滑 ‘refreshing and slippery’, and xìnì 细腻 ‘fine and
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 21

smooth’, are commonly employed to describe the taste. It is notable that

words rated as dominant in gustatory sensation in Chen et al. (2019) also
contain a large number of adjectives denoting texture, e.g., làn 烂 ‘mushy’,
sè 涩 ‘astringent’, sū 酥 ‘crisp; flaky’. We suggest that these words
describe kǒugǎn 口感 ‘mouthfeel’, which is a concept closely related to
taste and aroma but also greatly influenced by “the structure, texture and
responsible for the overall impression of the food” (Mouritsen and Styrbæk
2014, 6). Kǒugǎn 口 感 ‘mouthfeel’ ranks first in the list of “and/or”
relation to wèidào 味 道 ‘taste; smell’ in the corpus (with the highest
logDice score of 8.68), it, therefore, shares a very similar meaning with
wèidào 味 道 ‘taste; smell’. It can be shown that people consistently
confuse kǒugǎn 口感 ‘mouthfeel’ with wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’, as in the
following sentence:

(3) 蛋糕散发着浓郁的巧克力香气 ，轻轻品尝一口，香甜软滑的口

感，味道醇正而细腻。
Dàngāo sànfà zhe nóngyù de qiǎokèlì xiāngqì, qīngqīng
cake exude ZHE rich DE chocolate aroma light-light
pǐncháng yī kǒu， xiāngtián ruǎnhuá de kǒugǎn wèidào
taste one mouth sweet smooth DE mouthfeel taste
chúnzhèng ér xìnì.
mellow and delicate
‘The cake exudes a rich chocolate aroma. Take a little bite, and you
can feel the sweet and smooth texture, and the taste is mellow and
delicate.’

Although mouthfeel- and taste-related words exhibit an

interchangeable usage, Zhong and Huang (2018) and Zhong and Huang
(2020) suggested that descriptors of desserts in Mandarin Chinese are most
likely related to kǒugǎn 口感 ‘mouthfeel’ rather than wèidào 味道 ‘taste;
smell’, with nearly half of the mouthfeel items belonging to the tactile
perception. Jurafsky (2014) likewise suggested it is not the gustatory or
olfactory faculty but the tactile sense that plays a major role in describing
desserts in English. Nevertheless, the findings in this study and previous
studies all point to the influence and significance of tactile sensation in
bodily feelings of gustatory sensation.
22 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

5.3 Collocations with Visual Vocabulary

The remaining modifiers of wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ consist of
adjectives pertaining to the visual sense, as presented in Table 7. Zhao,
Xiong, and Huang (2019) claimed that instantiations of vision transferring
to taste sense were not frequent and common in Mandarin Chinese as well
as violated the embodiment-/biological-driven approaches in explaining
the transfer tendencies of linguistic synesthesia; therefore, this type of
transfer was not highlighted in the synesthetic directionality (e.g., Williams
1976; Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens 2019; Zhao, Xiong, and Huang 2019).
However, the data illustrated in Table 7 display a considerable number of
visual items modifying wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’:

Table 7 Visual related items to describe wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’

Visual related logDice Visual related logDice
Modifies/Modifiers score Modifies/Modifiers score
1 chún 纯 ‘pure’ 7.32 12 qīngliè 清冽 ‘limpid’ 3.8
fā-méi 发霉 ‘go
2 moldy’ 7.07 13 yōuyōu 幽幽 ‘faint’ 3.4

fēngyú 丰腴 ‘full and

3 fǔlàn 腐烂 ‘rot’ 6.52 14 3.39
round’
qīngshuǎng 清爽 chúnjìng 纯净 ‘pure
4 6.1 15 3.28
‘refreshing’ and clean’
dànyǎ 淡雅 ‘simple yōuyuǎn 悠远
5 5.53 16 2.93
and elegant’ ‘distant’
qīngchún 清纯 qīngyōu 清幽 ‘quiet
6 4.99 17 and beautiful’ 2.48
‘pure’
7 céngcì 层次 ‘layer’ 4.82 18 qīngchè 清澈 ‘limpid’ 2.39
hòuzhòng 厚重
8 4.56 19 qīngyíng 轻盈 ‘lithe’ 2.32
‘thick’
sùyǎ 素雅 ‘simple and
9 gānjìng 干净 ‘clean’ 4.44 20 2.2
elegant’
céngcìgǎn 层次感
10 4.4 21 qīngyǎ 清雅 ‘elegant’ 2.15
‘layering’
jīngzhì 精致 hòushí 厚实 ‘thick
11 3.92 22 1.47
‘delicate’ and solid’

The above table shows that the main feature of these visual-related
adjectives is that they are much more abstract than words from other
sensory domains, and most of them are related to simplicity, purity, and
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 23

elegance (e.g., chún 纯 ‘pure’, qīngshuǎng 清爽 ‘refreshing’, dànyǎ 淡雅

‘simple and elegant’, jīngzhì 精 致 ‘delicate’). In addition, when these
words are used to describe wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’, they give rise to
personification, and the target domain wèidào 味 道 ‘taste; smell’ is
portrayed as a human, as illustrated in the following instances (4) and (5):

(4) 这道茶最适合配点心来用，因为茶味不浓，相比其他性格强烈的
饮品，它清新淡雅的味道不会抢了点心的风头。
Zhè dào chá zuì shìhé pèi diǎnxīn lái yòng, yīnwèi
this CL tea most suit match dim-sum come use because
cháwèi bù nóng, xiāngbǐ qítā xìnggé qiángliè de yǐnpǐn,
tea-taste no intense compare other personality strong DE drink
tā qīngxīn dànyǎ de wèidào bù huì qiǎng le diǎnxīn
it fresh simple-elegant DE taste no will grab LE dim-sum
de fēngtóu.
DE limelight
‘This tea goes best with dim sum. As it is not too overbearing, unlike
other strong-flavored drinks, its fresh and elegant taste will not
outshine dim sum.’
(5) 让白兰地微妙而精致的味道取悦你的味蕾。
Ràng báilándì wéimiào ér jīngzhì de wèidào qǔyuè
let brandy delicate and exquisite DE taste please
nǐ de wèilěi.
you DE taste-bud
‘Let the delicate and exquisite taste of brandy please your taste buds.’

6. EMBODIMENT OF BODILY SENSATIONS

From the two sections above analyzing perceptions of spicy and
numbing and wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’ of the food, we have attested that
Mandarin Chinese treats chemesthesis-based tastes different to other basic
taste senses and the traditional taxonomy of five tastes is far from adequate
to present a full range of gustatory properties in Mandarin Chinese. This
supports the claim that we can discover cognitive mechanisms underlying
natural languages with semantic analysis (Ji 2020). However, the above
analysis additionally gave rise to the following questions: (1) Why do the
tactile and gustatory senses tend to be easily confused when describing
24 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

bodily feelings? (2) Why can the less embodied senses, i.e., the olfactory
and visual senses, transfer to the more embodied sense, i.e., gustatory sense?
(3) Why are no auditory-related adjectives used to modify the gustatory
sense? Accounting for these doubts might help to address our last research
question of how gustatory sense interacts with those more embodied and
those less embodied senses.
First, the reason for spicy and numbing being misunderstood as taste
sense might be the similarity between them and those bona fide taste senses
in terms of acquiring method. Just as how we perceive sweetness and
bitterness, the spicy and numbing feelings are also perceived through the
oral cavity in the process of eating. Such feelings, moreover, are produced
by spices such as chili pepper and Sichuan pepper, which Chinese people
normally consider as condiments together with salt, sugar, MSG, vinegar,
etc. that create various tastes. Therefore, although spiciness and numbness
activate different receptors from genuine tastes, ordinary Chinese people
would and could not distinguish these receptors from taste buds which are
all located in the oral cavity, and would simply regard the spicy and
numbing feelings as flavors added to the food akin to the sweet, sour, or
salty taste. With such tactile members in the gustatory family, it is thus
natural to use the more embodied tactile sense to express bodily tastes such
as spiciness and numbness. In addition, being non-taste chemesthesis, the
spicy and numbing feelings yet do interact with tastes, which makes the
tactile and gustatory senses more intertwined. Except for the relieving
effect of sweetness on the burning sensation produced by capsaicin as
mentioned earlier, spicy and numbing also display a close relation with
bitterness in the later stage of consuming hotpot, instantiated by phrases
such as yuè-zhǔ-yuè-kǔ 越煮越苦 ‘the longer it cooks, the bitterer it gets’.
The cause of this phenomenon can be found in Green and Schullery (2003)
that capsaicin is capable of stimulating a subset of taste neurons that
respond to bitter substances, and when applied to small areas of the tongue,
capsaicin can produce a bitter taste as well as a sensory irritation. Based on
language use, furthermore, Dong, Zhong, and Huang (2018) found that the
spicy and numbing flavors usually make it harder for diners to perceive
tastes. It can be backed by neurological findings that chili pungency and
anesthetic constituents containing Sichuan pepper may reduce the taste
intensity of foods (Prescott and Stevenson 1995; Rong et al. 2016).
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 25

In addition to the aforementioned biological interpretation of a close

relationship between tactile and gustatory sensations, the second notion we
propose is that the gustatory sense category, although bodily experie nced,
is conceptually abstract. For instance, apart from the original meaning
denoting gustation and olfaction, wèidào 味 道 ‘taste; smell’ is also
conceptually associated with the visual and hearing senses (cf. instances [6]
and [7]), and shows great versatility in its ability to map to various abstract
concepts (cf. instance [8]):

(6) 这款燃气灶亮丽的外观设计，充满着时尚的味道。(VISION)
Zhè kuǎn ránqìzào liànglì de wàiguān shèjì, chōngmǎn zhe
this CL gas-stove bright DE exterior design full-of ZHE
shíshàng de wèidào.
fashion DE taste
‘The external design of this brand of gas stoves is full of fashionable
taste.’
(7) 每一首歌都能听出用心的味道。(HEARING)
Měi yī shǒu gē dōu néng tīng chū yòngxīn de wèidào.
each one CL song all can listen out attentive DE taste
‘Each song sounds very attentive.’
(8) 爱情故事真的很美好，像是找回了青春的味道。
Àiqíng gùshì zhēn de hěn měihǎo, xiàng shì zhǎo huí le
love story really DE very beautiful seem is find back LE
qīngchūn de wèidào.
youth DE taste
‘Love stories are really beautiful; it is like rediscovering one’s
youthful days.’

Grounded on the versatility of wèidào 味道 ‘taste; smell’, it makes

perfect sense that when the bodily sensation is the focus, it is open to being
described by more embodied concepts (e.g., mouthfeel items related to
temperature and texture), and it is natural to use more embodied senses,
such as tactile sense, to describe gustatory perception. Since the feelings in
the mouth are considered concrete bodily sensations, confusing concepts
from these two closely connected senses is a matter of convenience.
26 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

On the other hand, when the focus is on the quality of sensation, i.e.,
the desirability and pleasantness of taste, as shown in the visual-related
examples, it is reasonable to use more conceptual and basic senses to
modify the less embodied sense. For example, apart from the visual
adjectives discussed above, various personality-related items were also
identified in the corpus that echo the depiction of taste as a human being.
These items include pǔshí 朴 实 ‘sincere and honest’, huópō 活 泼
‘vivacious’, tiáopí 调皮 ‘naughty’, bàdào 霸道 ‘overbearing’, zhāngyáng
张扬 ‘unabashed’, hánxù 含蓄 ‘introverted’, and dānchún 单纯 ‘simple’,
which in actuality illustrate either plain/bland or strong/rich tastes, see (9)
– (11):

(9) 尽管味道很朴实，但是松软的饼体已经让人爱不释口。
Jǐnguǎn wèidào hěn pushí, dànshì sōngruǎn de bǐngtǐ
although taste very simple but fluffy DE cake-texture
yǐjīng ràng rén ài-bù-shì-kǒu.
already let people eat-more-of-it
‘Although its taste is very simple, the fluffy texture is enough to make
one want to eat more of it.’
(10) 茶瓦纳冰摇桃桃绿茶带来了清新活泼的味道。
Cháwǎnà bīngyáo táotáo lǜchá dài lái le qīngxīn
TEAVANA ice-shake peach green-tea bring come LE fresh
huópō de wèidào.
lively DE taste
‘TEAVANA shaken iced peach green tea brings a fresh and lively
taste.’
(11) 这锅霸道的味道充斥了每个人的鼻腔。
Zhè guō bàdào de wèidào chōngchì le měi gè rén
this pot overbearing DE taste fill-up LE each CL person
de bíqiāng.
DE nasal-cavity
‘The strong smell from this pot fills up everyone’s nose.’

This finding is also consistent with the analysis of mouthfeel items

used to describe desserts in Mandarin Chinese in Zhong and Huang (2018)
and Zhong and Huang (2020), in which words that stemmed mainly from
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 27

impressions of personalities gained through social interactional contact

were often adopted to illustrate the mouthfeel of desserts.
Regarding the relationship between the gustatory sense and auditory
modality, although the hearing sense may occupy a place in the perception
of food in terms of textural properties, for example, crispness and
crackliness (Auvray and Spence 2008), Zhong and Huang (2018) and
Zhong and Huang (2020) also found a few examples of onomatopoeia
describing the mouthfeel of desserts, e.g., gēzhī-gēzhī 咯 吱 咯 吱
‘crunching sound’, shāshā 沙沙 ‘rustling sound’, zāzā 咂咂 ‘smacking
sound’. The lack of instantiation in the current corpus of auditory
adjectives describing the gustatory sense might be due to an insufficient
number of adjectives in the auditory sense: only 18 reported in Chen et al.
(2019) and 4 in Zhao, Xiong, and Huang (2019). It might also be that the
hearing sense was reported to be the most distant sense in previous
perceptual strength norms studies, where the ratings for how strongly one
experiences a concept via vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch senses
were collected (e.g., Lynott and Connell 2009, 2013; Chen et al. 2019;
Lynott et al. 2019). Hearing sense in such tests was constantly argued to
be the most distinct among all the basic senses since no clear correlation
with other senses was found. Given its distant relationship to the gustatory
sense and the other senses, it partly explains absent examples in this corpus
where auditory lexemes are used to describe the taste.
To sum up, regarding interactions among the gustatory sense and
tactile, olfactory, and visual senses, our data show that tactile and gustatory
sensations reveal an intimate and intertwined correlation with each other
when concrete bodily sensations are being discussed; while olfactory and
visual senses, which are deemed more distant and less embodied senses,
participate in picturing taste when the focus is on the quality of sensation.
Since there is no instantiation in the corpus showing hearing-related lexical
items being used to describe gustatory sense, the relationship between
gustatory and auditory senses revealed in language awaits future studies.

7. CONCLUSION
We demonstrate in this study that the traditional view of spicy and
numbing being one of the basic taste senses is not valid linguistically.
Furthermore, we also showed that the Chinese language contains a versatile
28 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

taxonomy of gustatory properties by using variegated non-taste lexical

items from other sensory domains to depict the perception of taste. This
tendency to embellish or elaborate gustatory properties might be the reason
why the more abstract flavor - umami, corresponding to gān 甘 ‘sweet;
tasty’, has receded into the background in the discussion of tastes in
Chinese. Yet, this argument may require a separate study to validate. We
also found an intertwined relationship between tactile and gustatory items
as a result of mixing up chemesthesis and mouthfeel words with genuine
taste vocabulary. Those more embodied senses, i.e., olfactory and visual
sensations, likewise manifest a substantial tendency to transfer to gustatory
sense, and it is argued that it is because the quality of sensation is
highlighted in such transfers. In the context of the cross-sensory
description of taste, the only sense domain not attested is the auditory sense.
This confirms that auditory modality is predominantly used as the target
domain in the cross-sensory mapping (e.g., Strik Lievers and Winter 2018;
Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens 2019). With assumptions of the intricate
interactions among the embodied senses and several remaining issues
raised in the study, it should be promising to further disentangle these
complexities in the interrelationship between language and perception.

NOTES

1. In what follows, names of sensations and their commonly known

forms will be used interchangeably, for example, gustatory sensation/sense
and taste sense both refer to the perception of taste.
2. It is an encyclopedic Chinese classic text and a compendium of
philosophical works compiled under the Qin Dynasty (3rd century BCE).
3. A word in Japanese combines the concept of umai ‘delicious’ and mi
‘essence’. It echoes the original meaning of gān 甘 ‘tasty’ or ‘savory’ as
defined in Duan (2007, 358) as well as the etymology of the orthography
(the character 甘 gān is formed through association by a diagram of tongue
with the center marked to indicate the location of tastes). Note that gān 甘
also carries the meaning of sweet despite it was later replaced by tián 甜
‘sweet’ and is normally used as a morpheme forming disyllabic words in
Modern Chinese.
 BODILY SENSATION AND EMBODIMENT 29

4. For instance, we will use huígān back-umami 回甘 ‘to have a sweet

and mellow aftertaste’ to describe the taste of tea and other beverage in
Chinese.
5. Also known as Old Chinese, the oldest attested stage of Chinese
language ranging from Shang Dynasty to Han Dynasty (16th century BCE–
220 CE) (Huang and Shi 2016, 3).
6. An ancient Chinese collection of philosophical writings composed
by Xun Kuang in the 3rd century.
7. According to Shuowenjiezi (Xu 1963, 157), the original meaning of
zuì 罪 is ‘fish-net’ (similar to luó 罗 ‘bird-net’) and the borrowing of this
character to stand for ‘crime; punishment’ happened in Qin Dynasty (3rd
century BCE).
8. Accessed at https://app.sketchengine.eu/.
9. It was established in 2003 and acts as a leading online city life guide
and one of the first online consumer service rating sites worldwide to
provide restaurant, shopping, entertainment, leisure, and day to day living
services through its interactive platform. Accessed at
http://www.dianping.com/.
10. Other two categories include Medium Review and Negative Review.
11. Accessed at https://www.octoparse.com/.
12. logDice score indicates how strong the collocation is; the higher the
score, the stronger the collocation (for the algorithm of logDice score,
please see Rychlý 2008).
13. The above-mentioned foods are almost always served with sugar in
Chongqing and Chengdu cities.
14. But it is more equivalent to do not like or do not want to eat
sweetness.
15. The character měi 美 is composed of 羊 ‘sheep’ and 大 ‘big’ and is
originally defined as gān 甘 ‘tasty; sweet’ in Shuowenjiezi (Xu 1963, 78).

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36 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT)

感官体验与具身认知
——基于语料库的汉语味觉词汇研究
钟隐 黄居仁 董思聪
香港理工大学 香港理工大学 哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）

摘要
具身认知(Embodiment)是研究人类语言概念表征的重要途径。前人对
语言中的通感(linguistic synesthesia)及感官词汇的实证研究发现感官之
间会因感官体验(bodily sensation)程度的不同呈现不同的映射规律。一
般来说感官体验度较高(more embodied)的感官(如触觉、味觉)会更趋
向于映射至体验度较低(less embodied)的感官(如视觉、听觉等)。本文
基于语料库对汉语味觉词汇进行详尽考察，并对感官体验与具身认知问
题展开讨论。我们主要分析两种现象：1)从生理学角度看不属于味觉感
知的“辣”和“麻”长期被汉语母语者视为味觉；2)汉语母语者在描述
食物味道时，会使用大量不属于味觉的其他感官词汇，而这些词汇有些
更是来自感官体验度较低的感官。本文提出，味觉作为较为抽象的认知
范畴，可借助感官体验度较高的词汇对其进行描述；但当人们需要强调
味觉特性时，体验度较低的感官词汇同样也可对味觉加以表达。本文的
分析进一步说明了具身认知对语言概念化研究的多重功能。

关键词
具身认知 汉语味觉词汇 通感 感官体验