In recent years, there has been a rise in research on sensorium in various academic disciplines. Olfaction is recognized as a sense that is most closely linked to cognition, memory and emotion. Due to this unique feature, studies on various aspects of human olfaction are steadily gaining prominence in the humanities and social sciences. In order to understand how the olfactory modality is marked, several taxonomies and semantic spaces of olfactory terms have been developed. However, the focus has been on the general olfaction lexicon and there is a lack of systematic and comprehensive lexicons for fragrant smells. This article addresses this gap. It adopts a multilingual perspective and describes the process of developing a fragrance lexicon in two languages, Russian and English. A fragrance lexicon refers to a list of words that people might use to describe a perfume. The steps in the lexicon development included •sourcing the lexical items in the two languages•translating and cleaning the word lists•revising and refining the lexiconThe fragrance lexicon presented in this article can be used to aid linguistic analyses of naturally occurring communications about perfumes, such as computational analyses of consumer-generated perfume reviews.
Quantitative applied linguistics research often takes place in restricted settings of an intact language classroom, workplace, phonetics laboratory or longitudinal sample. In such settings the samples tend to be small, which raises several methodological problems. The main aim of the current paper is to give a detailed explanation of methodological and practical implications inherent in a robust statistical method called bootstrapped quantile regression (BQR) analysis. Importantly for applied linguistics research, the BQR method could help to deal with methodological difficulties inherent in small sample studies. The current study employed a moderately small sample (N = 27) of students learning the Japanese language in a Malaysian public university. It examined the relationships between the students' language learning motivation (specifically, integrative orientation), the students' images or stereotypes about Japan and their global attitudes toward the target language country and its people. The findings indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between the students' attitudes toward the target language country and their integrative orientation. In addition, these attitudes were found to be the most constant determinant of the integrative orientation. Besides the applied linguistics research, the BQR method can be used in a variety of the human sciences research where a sample size is small.
Motivational drivers and emotions that students experience play an important role in the process of learning a new language (L2). This has been recognised by researchers and educators, and extensive research has been conducted in recent decades to examine the psychological and emotional factors involved in L2 learning. However, two ubiquitous epistemic emotions, namely, boredom and curiosity, remain underexplored in the L2 research literature. This study addresses this gap. It performed a series of statistical tests to examine the relationship between these two epistemic emotions and L2 motivation. Specifically, it assessed whether epistemic curiosity plays a mediating role in the nexus of L2 motivation, epistemic curiosity, and epistemic boredom. Data were collected from adolescent learners of English in China (N = 312). The findings from the correlation analysis indicated that epistemic boredom had statistically significant negative relationships with epistemic curiosity and L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Conversely, epistemic curiosity had a positive and statistically significant relationship with L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Next, the path analysis examined the influence of L2 motivation on epistemic boredom without considering the mediating effect of epistemic curiosity. Its findings indicated that epistemic boredom had a statistically significant negative relationship with the general motivation/attitude and general motivation/effort variables. The subsequent path analysis, which focused solely on two goal-oriented L2 motivation constructs from the Gardnerian framework, detected the mediating role of epistemic curiosity. Some pedagogical implications are drawn from these findings.