A World of Tastes: The Lexicographic Representation of Taste in A Worlde of Wordes

The present paper offers a survey of the gustatory lexical items in “A Worlde of Wordes” by John Florio. Many researchers are turning their attention to perception and its linguistic representation. The initial impetus towards this renewed interest for perceptual studies originates in the recognition that our minds and conceptual processes are fundamentally grounded in our bodies and are motivated by embodied cognition. At the same time, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has provided significant insights into the role that this mechanism plays in structuring lexical polysemy, both in a synchronic and in a diachronic perspective. Perhaps somehow surprisingly, there is a relative dearth of efforts that embrace both perspectives (but see Anderson 2019, Strik Lievers and De Felice 2019). This paper aims at bridging the gap, by means of a lexicographic analysis of the gustatory items included in “A Worlde of Wordes” and of their extended meanings glossed by John Florio. The work of the early linguist and lexicographer proves to be particularly apt for this aim, as it contains plenty gustatory lexical items, some of which are no longer in use (e.g., amaritudine agrire). Moreover, it offers the opportunity of perusing the extended meanings of these lexical items and to verify their development in the second half of the 16th century. The results will shed light on the array of contemporary metaphorical meanings that had already developed at the time in which the dictionary was compiled. To do so, the electronic version of the dictionary was searched with wildcards associated to the main lexical items in the domain of taste (Bagli 2021), and their occurrences and glosses were collected and analysed. The conceptual metaphors underlying each of the meaning extensions will be classified, so to have a clearer picture of the role of gustatory sensations in motivating conceptual processes in a diachronic perspective.