Metaphors in Polish, English, Russian, and French perfumery discourse A comparative study Magdalena Zawisławska and Marta Falkowska University of Warsaw This paper examines metaphors in perfume reviews in four languages, namely Polish, English, Russian, and French. Some typical features of the perfumery discourse, similar across the four languages, have been high- lighted, such as clustering, extension, and mixing metaphors. The authors also discuss the most typical schemata used in the conceptualization of per- fumes. Although the analyzed texts exhibit a certain similarity, a statistical analysis of the reviews identifes some interesting discrepancies between the languages, that is: unequal distribution of metaphorical types, preferences in usage of perceptual and non-perceptual source frames, and variance in perfume conceptualization (perfume is a woman vs. perfume is a man). Keywords: metaphor, perfumery discourse, synesthesia 1. Introduction Smell is a sense evaluated ambiguously in Western culture. On the one hand, olfaction is depreciated as it has been considered a low sense by philosophers since antiquity (see Howes, 2002; Le Guérer, 2002). A view that “olfaction pro- duced indefnite sensations” was voiced by Aristotle (see Cain, 2012, p. 204) and has been reprised repeatedly over the centuries (see Le Guérer, 2002). Classen, Howes, and Synnot (2003, p. 3) suggest that: smell […] is a highly elusive phenomenon. Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named – at least not in European languages. ‘It smells like…’, we have to say when describing an odour, groping to express our olfactory experience by metaphors. The lexical olfactory feld is indeed smaller as compared with the felds of visual or auditory perception, and olfactory perception is charged with subjectivity and https://doi.org/./msw..zaw Metaphor and the Social World : (), pp. –. ISSN - | E‑ISSN - © John Benjamins Publishing Company