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The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity
Edited by Łukasz Jędrzejowski and Przemysław Staniewski
[Typological Studies in Language 131] 2021
► pp. 449–474

Typology of metaphors with the olfactory target domain in the Polish perfumery discourse

| University of Warsaw
| University of Warsaw

The relative scarcity of lexical olfactory field in Polish makes it difficult to describe the complex and subjective sensation of smell. Unsurprisingly, the Polish perfumery discourse is permeated with various types of metaphors. This chapter proposes a typology of metaphors on the basis of excerpts from the Synamet–Polish corpus of synesthetic metaphors. The annotation of a metaphorical unit in Synamet is based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Fillmorean Frame Semantics. We distinguish several atypical metaphors: (i) mixed metaphors, i.e. metaphors involving several source frames; (ii) “entangled” metaphors, where syntactic dependencies in a metaphorical phrase conflict with the semantic relations between the elements; and (iii) narrative metaphors that exceed the boundaries of one sentence.

Keywords: synesthesia, olfactory metaphors, metaphor typology, corpus, perfumery discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Types of synesthetic metaphors
    • 2.3Method of analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Perfumery discourse in the Synamet corpus – Statistics
    • 3.2Atypical metaphors in the corpus
      • 3.2.1Mixed metaphors
      • 3.2.2Entangled metaphors
      • 3.2.3Narrative (extended) metaphors
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Mixed metaphors
    • 4.2Entangled metaphors
    • 4.3Narrative (extended) metaphors
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.131.15zaw
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