Synesthetic metaphor: Perception, cognition, and language

This dissertation investigates synesthetic metaphors of sound in English and Japanese based on corpus data of over 100 literary works and experimental data collected from 78 native speakers. Metaphorical expressions---adjectives borrowed into the auditory domain from other sensory domains---are analyzed from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, focusing on the key theoretical issues of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and primary metaphor theory: motivation, directionality, and universality. More specifically, it analyzes physical motivations of metaphors, explains the unidirectional tendency of the mapping, and suggests candidacies for universal metaphors.; As background, relevant findings from the following fields are discussed: philosophy, literature, anthropology, music theory, acoustics, psychology, and neuroscience. Examination of different types of conceptual mappings suggests that all metaphors arise from sensory experience and can be categorized as either correlation or resemblance, although each metaphor may have multiple motivations of both types. For analyzing synesthetic metaphors of sound, the three levels---perception, cognition, and language---are characterized as follows: (1) humans share the biological process of hearing and vocalization; (2) culture determines which conceptual mappings are emphasized within the universally available mappings; (3) language restricts how concepts are overtly represented.; Corpus analysis shows that the twenty adjectives investigated have similar meanings and usages in English and Japanese, but there are some differences at the linguistic level (e.g., onomatopoeia) or conceptual level (e.g., metaphor). These two levels are pursued with experiments of two tasks (description, adjective) involving two independent variables: language (English, Japanese) and sound types (environmental sound, music, speech). The description task reveals how language-specific aspects including grammatical categories and lexical items influence the descriptions of sound. The adjective task reveals which synesthetic mappings are selected among the cross-culturally shared choices based on socio-cultural factors. It is suggested that the linguistic and conceptual levels need to be distinguished by considering the semantic network of each adjective.; This study demonstrates that the expressions of sensory phenomena are determined by both the nature of the stimuli and cultural characteristics. Communication involves the integration of perceptual and cognitive information, which may be either universal or culture-specific. Thus, language reflects the interface between perception and cognition.