In the following two chapters we treat a set of descriptive taste terms in Japanese, defined by our delimitation procedure as constituting the lexical field of AJI ‘taste’. We will see that, extralingually, the members of this field range over a domain wider than that of ‘taste’ in the scientific sense (i.e. gustation), but narrower than that of ‘taste’ when it is equated with the whole of the ingestion experience, including parameters such as texture, consistency and temperature.

The present chapter is organized as follows. In 5.1 the lexical field is delimited, and the grammatical characteristics of the member terms are described in 5.2. In 5.3 the initial field is subdivided into the lexical systems AJI I, AJI II, and AJI III, and the semantic structure of AJI I, the largest system, is analysed in 5.4. The semantic structure of the remaining systems, and other semantic aspects of the field, are described in Chapter 6.

Delimitation

As outlined in 3.1, the general strategy adopted in this study toward the investigation of lexical fields is, by asking appropriate questions, to determine what lexical fields and systems, with what members, are present in the language, and subsequently to examine the semantic relations which hold among members. That is to say, the question of what a lexical item means is approached by considering what basic question(s) it occurs in answers to, what other items also occur in such answers, and how the items are semantically related to each other and to aspects of extralinguistic reality.