The taste of smells

Abstract Synesthetic expressions are generally taken to be metaphorical phenomena involving a mapping across distinct perceptual domains based on cross-modal commonalities between them. The present paper seeks to supplement this view so far as to point out that some synesthetic expressions are essentially metonymic since they do not involve any cross-modal similarities or correspondences and are rather based either on the co-occurrence of stimuli from different sensory modalities, and/or on similarities within a single sensory modality. In order to find out how pervasive the metonymic motivation of synesthetic expressions might be, the study focuses on attribute-noun constructions combining taste with smell in Hungarian. The results of the corpus investigation suggest that a considerable portion of the synesthetic expressions under scrutiny are in fact metonymic, yet the frequency of taste adjectives describing smells, as well as that of the metonymic cases is unequally distributed across nouns designating pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant smells.