This PhD project deals with the relationship between language and perception, with a focus on the conceptual knowledge structures we draw on to understand specific lexical items found in food discourse. The study includes an analysis of the usage of sensory descriptors in the scientific field of sensory science as well as a corpus-based approach to everyday language. An application of Fillmore’s theory of Frame Semantics (cf. 2006, 1976) has proven successful in order to detect the conceptual frames that are evoked by specific lexemes. Moreover, a close analysis of the syntactic realizations of sensory adjectives shows the linguistic realizations of these knowledge frames.