Making Sense Out of Five Senses: Body-Mediated Cognition

Abstract

This paper focuses on the five human sensory organs and their functions with reference to their cognitive and linguistic significance as reflected in English. The five human senses consist of visual, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and tactile senses. The terms of body-parts involved in the sensory perception of their perceptual functions are selected and their usage was investigated by means of the MICASE Corpus of English. The frequencies of occurrence of each of the terms and their semantic characteristics were investigated. A quantitative, i.e. statistical, and qualitative, i.e. semantic, investigation brings forth numerous implications, among which the following are those that are noteworthy pertaining to the human body and its mediated cognition reflected in English: (i) The visual perception has by far the highest level of cognitive salience; (ii) The conceptual salience hierarchy specific to body-parts is largely in the order of: Visual > Auditory > Olfactory > Gustatory > Tactile; (iii) Bodily functions, i.e. verbal uses, have higher salience than the body-parts themselves, i.e. nominal uses; (iv) Since the visual term designates cognitive activity (as ‘understanding’) more frequently than the mere visual perception activity, its use is predominantly in the present tense (as if it is a stative verb of cogitation); and (v) The auditory term draws a sharp contrast with the visual term in that hear is largely referring to the auditory perceptual activity, and thus it has a largely similar frequency in terms of tense-differences between the present and the past. The gustatory and tactile senses pose methodological problems for their lexical diffusion and their frequent uses in other non-sensory, polysemous, meanings.