Bold colors, sweeping melodies, offensive smells

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based exploratory study of the figurative conceptualizations of visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli in English and Hungarian. Through a manual semantic analysis of altogether 6,800 occurrences of 18 sensory nouns (three per sensory modality in each language) in the TenTen corpora, the following conceptualization types of perceptual stimuli have been examined: reification, agentification, animization, and personification. The paper presents the relative frequencies of these conceptualizations along with their subtypes and concrete linguistic manifestations in English and Hungarian. Among a number of interesting observations that call for further investigations, the following findings merit special attention: (1) visual stimuli have the lowest values in every category; (2) in both languages, agentification is the most typical in the case of olfaction; (3) with the exception of representations of olfactory stimuli as living beings, every conceptualization type is more frequent in the Hungarian data.