The focus of much sensory language research has been on vocabulary and codability, not how language is used in communication of sensory perceptions. We make a case for discourse-oriented research about sensory language as an alternative to the prevailing vocabulary orientation. To consider the language of sound in authentic textual data, we presented participants with 20 everyday sounds of unknown sources and asked them to describe the sounds in as much detail as possible, as if describing them to someone who could not hear them. We explored how the participants use language to describe these sounds. Do they describe their listening experiences (stressful), sound properties (intermittent beeping), and/or the events that caused the sounds (eating an apple)? The results show that out of these three soundscape elements, events are the most frequent and most indispensable element. We let the results from the study illustrate the need for more discursive data in studies of sensory language and argue that there is no designated language of sound. Our study highlights that in order to account for sensory language use, we need an analytical framework that accommodates discursive language in a non-trivial way beyond stable couplings between individual words and meanings.

中文翻译：

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声音的语言：事件和意义的单词多任务处理

许多感官语言研究的重点是词汇和可编码性，而不是如何使用语言来传达感官知觉。我们提出了关于感官语言的以话语为导向的研究，作为流行词汇导向的替代方案。为了考虑真实文本数据中的声音语言，我们向参与者提供了 20 种来源不明的日常声音，并要求他们尽可能详细地描述这些声音，就像向听不见它们的人描述它们一样。我们探讨了参与者如何使用语言来描述这些声音。他们是否描述了他们的聆听体验（有压力的）、声音特性（间歇性蜂鸣声）和/或引起声音的事件（吃一个苹果）？结果表明，在这三个音景元素中，事件是最频繁且最不可或缺的元素。我们让研究结果说明在感官语言研究中需要更多的话语数据，并认为不存在指定的声音语言。我们的研究强调，为了解释感官语言的使用，我们需要一个分析框架，以超越单个单词和含义之间的稳定耦合的方式，以一种非平凡的方式容纳话语语言。