Sensing the Past: Multimodal Adjectives

This chapter discusses the role of multisensorial adjectives in evoking past experiences using song lyrics as primary material. The review of research shows how sensory language is fundamentally multimodal due to the complexity of embodied experience. This discussion is followed by a brief survey of stylistic research on song lyrics. The analysis then combines insights from norm-rating data on multisensorial adjectives with an investigation of concurrent musical elements, additionally drawing on the concept of cross-modal iconicity in intermedial studies.