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Perception metaphor refers to the use of a perceptual concept as a source or target domain (e.g. "sweet voice", "heavy job", "have smell") in metaphorical conceptualization, grounded in our perceptual experience (Barsalou [1]; Gibbs [2]; Lakoff and Johnson [3]). This study observes that the close correlation between taste and touch motivates the semantic extension of " p" from taste to touch and emotion. These touch metaphors are motivated by our perceptual experience, with touch "as a privileged means of experiencing the physical world" (213) in the Theory of Objectification. [Extracted from the article]

Using a permutation-based approach, the study measures the modality exclusivity of sensory adjectives and observes the low average modality exclusivity of touch and taste words. The high average cosine similarity of adjective-noun pairs indicates modality affinity, that is, "sensory words tend to combine with words that have similar perceptual characteristics" (p. 179). Both the absolute valence measure and the context valence measure for the twelve clusters of sensory words indicate that most taste and smell words are either positive or negative. [Extracted from the article]