Sourness in the flesh: cultural shaping of somatic experience in Mandarin Chinese

In some Sino-Tibetan languages, the gustatory term meaning ‘sour’ is widely used to describe somatosensory states such as muscle aches, exertional soreness, and tender sensations during acupuncture: a sensation called sngception. This study draws from the fields of linguistic anthropology, medical humanities, and corpus linguistics to investigate the cultural-historical and cognitive basis of sngception. Through a corpus analysis of modern Mandarin Chinese, the current study examined the semantic patterns and collocations of suān (酸) ‘sour.’ With current medical findings on acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs), the sourness metaphor emerges as both physiologically and culturally grounded. Such cultural-linguistic frameworks play a significant role in shaping how discomfort is perceived and interpreted, which calls for greater attention to clinical awareness of culturally embedded expressions of pain in intercultural healthcare settings.