Multi-perspective olfactory verbs in English, German, French, and Spanish

Abstract

This paper reports on a corpus-based quantitative study of the central olfactory verbs of four European languages: English ( smell ), German ( riechen ), French ( sentir ), and Spanish ( oler ). The manual annotation of 400 random occurrences of each verb in the TenTen corpora encompassed four aspects of analysis: the three ways of conceptualizing perceptual events (e.g., the wine smells wonderful ; I smell smoke ; she knelt down to smell the daffodil ); axiology (positive, neutral, negative); metaphoricity; and constructions (subjects and complements). Among other intriguing patterns, the examination has shed light upon considerable differences between the frequency of the metaphorical uses of the four verbs, with Spanish oler showing the highest proportion (above 40%). Further, the data on French sentir have revealed a close connection between the ça -construction and metaphoricity: two thirds of the verb’s metaphorical uses are formulated with ça (e.g., ça sent l’arnaque ‘this smells of a scam’).