Universal regulation in English taste naming

Dr. Seija Kerttula

Researcher, Department of English, University of Helsinki

seija.kerttula@helsinki.fi

It has been shown that colour naming is influenced by universal
regulation caused by physiological and physical factors involved in
colour perception (e.g.  Kay and Terrier, 2003) There have been attempts
to find analogical tendencies in terminologies for other senses, but
research in these never reached the popularity of colour term studies. 
The present paper is an attempt to broaden this view.  It reports the
results from applying a model of relative basicness to English taste
terms.  The model (Kerttula, 2002, forthcoming) was initially developed
for measuring how established English colour terms are in relation to
each other. 

There are four traditional basic taste term categories: sweet, salty,
sour, and bitter, which all have proven receptors in the mouth, mainly
in the tongue.  Scientists believe the receptors were evolved from a
need to find proper nutrition for survival.  Researchers have searched
for a physiological basis for a fifth taste term category describing the
taste of monosodium glutamate (found e.g.  in meat, strong cheese, eggs,
seafood, mushrooms, asparagus, tomatoes, and soy sauce) since the early
20th century, but the receptors for it were only found in 2000
(Chaudhari et al., 2000).  This taste, well identified by Eastern
languages, was called umami after the Japanese word, because it did not
seem to have a counterpart in English. 

The present study was done using the British National Corpus, a 100
million-word corpus of the English language, from which all occurrences
of essential taste terms were extracted.  The material was analysed
manually, and references to other sensations (sweet voice), metaphoric
uses (a tart remark), metonymic uses (salty fisherman), proper names
(Henry Sweet), names of plants, products, etc.  (sweet potato) and
homonyms (bitter 'beer') were separated from those of taste.  The
remaining taste-related data and information from monolingual
dictionaries as well as the Taste section of the Historical Thesaurus of
English were utilised to determine the values for the parameters of the
model. 

The final total values of relative basicness were used to examine
whether the terms with top values correspond to the known basic tastes,
whether these also have the longest histories, whether any of the terms
has glutamate referents, and whether there are other relatively
established taste terms than those for the basic tastes. 

The results show clear correspondences between physiological and lexical
preferences and so provide further evidence for both universal
conditioning and the usability of the model.  Sweet, which represents
the most distinctive taste sensation, is the oldest of English taste
terms and also scores the highest value of relative basicness.  Closest
to sweet reaches bitter, and these two are the first tastes recognized
by infants (Tatzer et al, 1985).  The referents of savoury prove to
overlap with substances that contain monosodium glutamate.  Savoury also
receives a high value of relative basicness, equal to that of the two
traditional basic taste terms sour and salty, and can be considered as
one of the basic taste terms. 

References: 

British national corpus. Homepage: http://escorp.unizh.ch

Chaudhari, Nirupa, Ana Marie Landin and Stephen D.  Roper (2000). 
"Ametabotropic glutamate receptor variant functions as a taste
receptor." Nature Neuroscience, February Vol.  3 Number 2, 113-119. 

Historical Thesaurus of English, Taste section.  University of Glasgow. 
The homepage of the project:
http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/thesaur/homepage.htm

Kay, Paul and Terry Regier (2003).  "Resolving the question of color
naming universals." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America.  100: 9085-9089. 

Kerttula, Seija (2002).  English colour terms: Etymology, chronology,
and relative basicness.  Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de
Helsinki, 60.  Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. 

Kerttula, Seija (forthcoming).  "Relative basicness of color terms:
modeling and measuring." In Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary
Multilevel Modeling (ed.  Robert MacLaury). 

Tatzer, E, MT Schubert, W.  Timischl and G.  Simbruner (1985)
Discrimination of taste and preference for sweet in premature babies. 
Early Human Development, 12:23-30.