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Cross-linguistic support for the universality of the belief in five senses| old_uid | 13516 |
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| title | Cross-linguistic support for the universality of the belief in five senses |
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| start_date | 2014/02/27 |
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| schedule | 11h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Sensory Categorization Relativism (SCR) is the thesis according to which the traditional Westerner conception of the senses is relative (Howes, 1991, 2003, Classen, 1993b, 1997). In particular, some people have recently argued that the enumeration of the senses in five or our belief in five senses is a cultural variant (Cassaniti & Luhrmann, 2011). In this paper, I argue that such thesis is unmotivated. In the first section, I introduce and discuss certain arguments in favour of SCR: the argument from sensory category ranking (Geurts, 2002) and the argument of cross-linguistic variations (Ritchie, 1991). In the second section, I focus on cross-linguistic variations and introduce a universalist interpretation of the lexical specialization of the verbs of sensory perception (Viberg, 1984, Majid & Levinson, 2007). In particular, I put forward a preliminary model of the classification of our sensory lexicon—à la Berlin & Kay (1969)—based upon the idea that our folk enumeration of the senses in five results (i) from the salience of our sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue) and (ii) from the spatial relation that those senses entertain with environmental information. Ultimately, I argue that this model could support the thesis that our belief in five senses is not conventional (in the Lewisian sense of the word), contrary to what Nudds (2004) claims. |
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| responsibles | Giardino |
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