What we talk about when we talk about smells: a corpus study of the language of olfaction

Gunn, Kyle (2026) What we talk about when we talk about smells: a corpus study of the language of olfaction. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

One of the fundamental uses of language is that it allows us to communicate the things we perceive with our senses. While most of the senses have dedicated vocabulary which speakers can draw on to describe their experiences—visual colour terms, taste terms like sour, words to do with hearing like loud or texture like rough—the sense of smell is less lexically well served, in English at least.

In light of this paucity of dedicated vocabulary, this thesis seeks to find which words and linguistic strategies English speakers use when they wish to put complex olfactory experiences into words. It accomplishes this through the investigation of a purpose-built corpus of fragrance reviews taken from the perfume community website Fragrantica. It first establishes the key semantic domains of the corpus, before providing a corpus-driven analysis of the language of olfaction around each of these key domains. This analysis begins with those domains most semantically distant from the sense of smell (like Time), then moves towards the senses in semantic space with an analysis of words to do with the linked domains of Food and Plants, before offering an analysis of directly sensory words themselves. Finally, it deals with more complex olfactive descriptions which use aspects of character and setting to communicate olfactory information.

Through investigating the semantics of olfactive language in this corpus-driven way, this thesis presents three main conclusions. First, it argues that when source-based descriptors are employed in olfactory description, non-olfactory components of those descriptors also play a role in generating olfactive meaning. Second, that a primary strategy for communicating olfactive meaning is through connotation and association rather than direct sensory description. And third, that when words from non-olfactory sensory domains are used to communicate olfactive meaning, this cross-modal use does not represent a metaphoric transfer of meaning, but rather indicates that the semantic domains of the senses are so closely and densely linked that they can be considered a contiguous domain of perception.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: Supported in part by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
• Funder's Name: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• Supervisor's Name: Alexander, Professor Marc and Anderson, Professor Wendy
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85812
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 18 Mar 2026 11:23
• Last Modified: 18 Mar 2026 11:23
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85812