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EXPLORING SMELL FROM A COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE IN ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN (A CORPUS STUDY)

Perception is universal for human beings but linguists are interested whether it is conceptualized the same way in different languages. The focus of this article is the concept of smell and how it is linguistically coded in English and Bulgarian. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated when they appear in context. This study is corpus-based to capture, on the one hand, the conceptual organization of smell and, on the other hand, the structure of more abstract concepts. The study applies the cognitive perspective to interpret the conceptual metaphors in the domain of smell. The interplay of senses is used to enhance the “linguistic codability” of perceptions. Smell, which is on the whole understudied, together with touch and taste, offers a wide variety of metaphoric interpretations not only within one language but also across languages. The range of usage that is readily observable in the corpus reveals that this type of data must form the basis for empirically grounded studies of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that cross-linguistic analogy in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal experiences of social interaction.