Book Review: Storyworld Possible Selves

Abstract

so-called ‘synesthetic metaphors’ (such as sweet smell and loud colour) are neither synesthetic nor metaphorical. Rather, such adjectives as sweet and loud are ‘highly supramodal descriptors that encompass multiple senses’ (p. 238). Winter uses two arguments to back up this claim. One, ‘the involved perceptual modalities are highly integrated’ (p. 96), an observation that is the logical consequence of his rejection of the five senses folk model. In other words, since the senses are not discrete modalities, it serves no purpose to talk in terms of using one domain (e.g. the gustatory domain to which sweet belongs) to talk about another domain (the olfactory domain of smell). Two, ‘crossmodal uses simply follow from word-inherent evaluative meaning’ (p. 96), by which he means that an adjective such as sweet is used to talk about smell simply for its evaluative meaning, i.e. the fact that it has positive connotations. In other words, when we use what appears to be a synesthetic metaphor such as sweet smell, we do so because sweet is a positive adjective and not because sweet belongs to a different semantic domain to smell. As Winter points out, his ‘literal analysis of synesthetic metaphors’ has ‘far-reaching conclusions for lexical semantics and conceptual metaphor theory’, not least because it ‘compels us to see the continuity of the senses as reaching all the way down into the lexical representation of individual words’ (p. 238). This is a real and welcome challenge to conceptual metaphor theory with its implicit notion of discrete ‘domains’. Winter’s book, then, is valuable not least for its methodological rigour and its theoretical innovativeness. It provides sensory linguistics with a very firm foundation that future researchers can build upon. One possible path that sensory linguists might take (a path not signalled byWinter) is to explore (as Ullmann did in his 1945 article on Keats and Byron) how poetry in particular draws on the sensory nature of language. There are scattered references inWinter’s book to the important work in cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur, but sensory linguistics would benefit from a much more sustained and comprehensive treatment of the sensoriness of poetic language.