A Cognitive Approach To Synaesthetic Metaphors

Synaesthesia is a kind of rhetorical device. It means the use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds. Synaesthesia has aroused great interests from scholars in many fields, including rhetoric, semantics, and cognitive psychology. Meanwhile, synaesthesia is more than a rhetorical device. It is a kind of neurological symptom, which is named as clinical synaesthesia in the thesis. Synaesthetes can see certain colors while hearing a sound, or can taste shapes in food. The study of clinical synaesthesia can provide some neurological and psychological basis for the synaesthetic metaphors although the two are different issues.Since the foundation of Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, many scholoars have retrospected and criticized the traditional theory of rhetoric, and cognitive approaches have been applied to the study of synaesthetic metaphors. This thesis tries to probe into the construction process of synaesthetic metaphors within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory.Abundant synaesthetic metaphors exist in literature and daily life. As it is involved with basic five senses as well as inner feelings of human beings, its forms are diverse and need to be classified. Based on the research results from many scholars, this thesis tries to solve this problem by making a comparatively systematic classification of synaesthetic metaphors. Examples from different languages are provided, which may shed some lights on the cognitive universality of human beings.