Olfactory Signs as Objects of Verbalization

Abstract

Human sensory experience has a fundamental role in conceptualizing the realities of the sur-rounding world and representing them in linguistic constructions. When it comes to olfactory information available to people, a significant part of the linguistic material consists of describing smells with the view of their classification and their ontological and evaluative characteristics. Also, linguistic objectification of situations of cognizing olfactory signs has pronounced patterns, and, as a mental construct reflected in the mind, the olfactory situation in-cludes a number of obligatory and optional components. By means of frame analysis of German olfactory language, the article demonstrates the interaction of static and dynamic knowledge about olfactory perception. The result of this research is a conceptual framework that describes the principles of organizing information about smells. The author sees the clas-sification frame as a storage format for static data: it has a categorical structure and stores knowledge about various types of smells. Its slots are filled with specific information based on identifying real or background objects that are sources of smells, as well as on quantitative or normative evaluations given by the subject. Analyzing linguistic explications of the olfactory situation, which are representations of the situational frame, shows the presence of re-peated categorical components (categorical nodes) in the linguistic material. They are associ-ated with ontological categories of human existence. Among them are the subject and the object of cognition, the subject’s action, the space-time frame of the situation, the instrument of cognition, and the result. It is obvious that the presence of obligatory components in the utterance (subject, object, cognitive action) is due to the need of the author to describe the ontological specifics of the process of cognition of an olfactory sign. The objectification of optional components in the utterance depends on the goals of communication. The comparison of formats for storing knowledge about the olfactory sign makes it possible to explain the relationship between the classification and situational frames as an interaction between something general and something particular. The resulting findings contribute to current discussions of issues related to structuring knowledge and general categorization of reality by individuals.