The semantic organization of olfactory vocabularies is derived with a novel, data-driven method that uses natural texts (corpora), on the one hand, and more traditional, lexical-typological methods, on the other.

• In the first part of the project, corpus-based methods are used to derive the olfactory vocabularies of English, Swedish, Italian and Thai. This methods automatically identify odor expressions based on the strength of their olfactory associations. Then, the semantic space of those expressions is derived with word embedding modeling.
• The second part of the project consists of a lexical-typological study of the olfactory vocabularies of a sample of linguistically diverse languages with well-developed, dedicated olfactory expressions. Here, elicitation-based methods such as exemplar listings and similarity judgments will be used.
• The final part of the project consolidates the findings from the corpus-based and lexical-typological studies. This will provide more general conclusions about how languages map out the perceptual space of odors and whether olfactory vocabularies differ in culturally relevant ways.

The aim of the project is to show whether there is “universal” olfactory-semantic space. It will thus provide a key theoretical contribution to the field of linguistics.