Color Me Bitter: Crossmodal Compounding in Tzeltal Perception Words

Within a given language and culture, distinct sensory modalities are often given differential linguistic treatment in ways reflecting cultural ideas about, and uses for, the senses. this article reports on sensory expressions in the Mayan language tzeltal, spoken in southeastern Mexico. Drawing both on data derived from tzeltal consultants’ responses to standardized sensory elicitation stimuli and on sensory descriptions produced in more natural contexts, I examine words characterizing sensations in the domains of color and taste. In just these two domains, a limited set of basic terms along with productive word-formation processes of compounding and reduplication are used in analogous ways to produce words that distinguish Penelope Brown is a Senior Researcher, Emeritus, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She has done field research for many years in the Tzeltal Maya community of Tenejapa, Mexico, studying topics in sociolinguistics, language and cognition, and child language. [email protected]