The aim of this book is to provide a semantic description of taste terms in modern spoken Japanese. It originates in a doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Edinburgh in 1978, which has subsequently undergone substantial revision and expansion. The main additions in the present work take account of more recent publications in the area, provide additional sources of Japanese language data, and give wider consideration to cross-linguistic aspects of taste terms.

The book is organized in the following way. Chapters 1–3 are background chapters, dealing with the general study of taste and taste terms, lexical semantic fields, and the methodological approach adopted in the work. These are followed by the analysis of the Japanese terms: evaluative taste terms (glossed as ‘good-tasting’/‘bad-tasting’) are described in Chapter 4, descriptive taste terms (‘sweet’, ‘astringent’, ‘aromatic’, etc.) in Chapters 5 and 6. The final chapter relates the findings to broader issues in the study of taste and taste terms, and offers some directions for further research. The Japanese terms described are brought together for convenience in the Appendix, where they are listed together with a brief summary of their semantic properties.

I am indebted to a number of people for their help and advice during the evolution of this study. Valuable comments on various stages of the work have been provided by John Christie, Bob Dixon, George Jelinek, J. V. Neustupný, and Anna Wierzbicka, and by three anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. Portions of the analysis were presented in earlier versions at conferences and seminars in Brisbane, Canberra and Osaka, and I am grateful to the participants on those occasions for their comments.