A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis Of Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia refers to a feeling produced in some sensorial category transferred to another sensorial category. As a figure of speech, synaesthesia is frequently used in daily expressions and literary works and it leads to the achievement of a special rhetorical effect for its novelty and particularity. With the development of cognitive linguistics, synaesthesia is not only regarded as a rhetorical device but also a basic mode of thinking. However, the author finds that the study on synaesthesia so far has limited itself to the respect of its structural features, rhetorical functions and psychological mechanism. Few of the researchers have explored its meaning construction and the great influence that cognitive context exerts upon in the comprehension and application. This paper, taking embodied philosophy and conceptual blending theory (CBT) as its theoretical foundation, tentatively interprets the cognitive processes of meaning construction of synaesthesia.The paper is divided into six parts. Part one furnishes an introduction to the situation of present research on rhetoric, including the reasons and purpose of choosing such a topic. Also, it provides the construction of the thesis.Chapter One offers a general view of synaesthesia, and the distinctions between synaesthesia and metaphor, which can provide a better understanding of synaesthesia. In the author's opinion, researches on synaesthesia should not only focus on analyzing its structure. Instead, it is elementary to unveil why people choose synaesthesia in their utterances and how synaesthesia is processed in our brain.Chapter Two draws on Lakoff and Johnson's Embodied Philosophy, and makes a conclusion that synaesthesia is both neurally and phenomenologically embodied. Traditionally, human reason is regarded as separate from and independent of all bodily capacities. This distinction between mind and body did not give due regard to the role of the body in the mind. Recent work in cognitive science makes it clear that many of our most basic concepts and reasoning via those concepts are embodied. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) put forward the Embodied Philosophy (or the Embodied Cognition Theory) in their Philosophy in the Flesh. Similar to the metaphor, synaesthesia is also embodied in three ways: concrete source domains, neural embodiment, and phenomenological embodiment.Chapter Three and chapter Four are the core of the thesis. Chapter Three employs conceptual blending theory to analyze the construction process of synaesthesia. Conceptual blending theory (CBT) advanced by Fauconnier and Turner has been widely applied to meaning construction of many linguistics phenomena. Conceptual blending is a general cognitive operation, which opens up a new field for studying meaning construction at all levels. In this thesis, the author intends to demonstrate that the cognitive process of meaning construction of synaesthesia can be explained by CBT. Chapter Four firstly discusses the importance of context in both pragmatic and rhetoric; then it takes cognitive context into consideration and discusses the comprehension and application of synaesthesia in it. Pragmaticists and rhetoricians are all sure of the importance of context. Their views are overlapping insofar as they believe that context plays a decisive role in the production and interpretation of utterances. As a matter of fact, context's significance not merely lies in this matter, but also lies in the fact that almost every aspect of pragmatic and rhetorical study has its reliance upon it. This is why it is generally agreed that context is a prerequisite for both pragmatic rhetorical theories.The last part draws a conclusion that synaesthesia should and can be interpreted from the perspective of cognition and pragmatics. In a word, synaesthesia is a special collocation and studies from such a cognitive-pragmatic perspective reveal more about the internal nature of the synaesthesia and may serve as valuable information for further study.