Inter-Sense: An Investigation of Sensory Blending in Fiction

TL;DR

This paper explores how sensory descriptors in fiction are semantically organized and interconnected, using large-scale distributional semantics to analyze sensory blending across five senses in a vast corpus of novels.

Contribution

It introduces a data-driven method using word embeddings to identify and analyze sensory descriptors and their interconnections in fiction, advancing understanding of perceptual language representation.

Findings

Semantic organization of sensory descriptors revealed

Identification of sensory blending patterns in fiction

Insights into perceptual space structure

Abstract

This study reports on the semantic organization of English sensory descriptors of the five basic senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell in a large corpus of over 8,000 fiction books. We introduce a large-scale text data-driven approach based on distributional-semantic word embeddings to identify and extract these descriptors as well as analyze their mixing interconnections in the resulting conceptual and sensory space. The findings are relevant for research on concept acquisition and representation, as well as for applications that can benefit from a better understanding of perceptual spaces of sensory experiences, in fiction, in particular, and in language in general.