Synesthetic metaphor under embodied cognition : a corpus-based study on gustatory lexicon “sour” in Chinese and English

Abstract

Synesthesia is a phenomenon when one experiences a kind of sense through another sense involuntarily and automatically. In past studies, it has been regarded as a physiological phenomenon, and some people have viewed it as a kind of metaphor, that is, synesthetic metaphor. Linguists took it for granted as a subcategory of rhetorical devices until later this view was discredited. Domestic scholars have also glossed over the nature of synesthetic metaphor, which is a cross-sensory mapping. Its source domain and target domain are equally concrete, so there is no mapping from concrete domain to abstract domain. In addition, in the field of synaesthesia, some overseas studies focus on extracting the mapping direction model among languages but ignore the uniqueness of languages. For example, some crossmodal mapping directions in Chinese are not necessarily from more embodied senses to less embodied senses. This is worth further study in the future. Therefore, this paper focuses on the gustatory word sour as the object, identifies the Chinese and English sour-related synaesthesia, analyzes the examples of synaesthesia metaphors with the help of corpus and dictionary, and makes a comparison between Chinese and English synaesthesia metaphors. The final purpose of my present study is to figure out the underlying factors that cause the similarities and differences between Chinese and English synesthesia. In the end, this study has found that physiological mechanism, experiences from physical world, and different tactile vocabulary systems may explain these phenomena, which provides new directions for future research.