A Study Of Synaesthesia From A Cognitive Perspective

Synaesthesia is regarded as part of rhetoric in traditional research. With the development of cognitive linguistics, many scholars have taken up synaesthesia from a cognitive perspective and have made some achievements. However, previous studies have their limitations: (1) Most empirical studies investigate synaesthesia in languages of the Indo-European family; so further studies should be carried out to see whether the popular linguistic phenomena of synaesthesia analyzed in those studies are cross-lingually universal. (2) Empirical studies of Chinese synaesthesia lay emphasis on entrenched lexical meaning, hardly including the linguistic phenomena of synaesthesia in literary language. Therefore, they are not called comprehensive studies. (3) Previous studies of sensory transferring patterns incline to discover the synaesthetic directionality, rarely touching upon the frequency of the use of the different senses, and a systematic and profound explanation for some popular phenomena should be taken into account. (4) Both Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory can be applied to explain synaesthesia, but the explanatory power of these two theories for synaesthesia should be compared systematically. This thesis thereby attempts to deal with these problems.The thesis takes both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis in its investigation. We have collected the data of Chinese synaesthesia from The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (the 5^th edition) and the six issues of a famous bimonthly literary periodical October in the year of 2007. The data of English synaesthesia is retrieved from the previous literature on synaesthesia (mainly from Bretones 2001 and Li Guonan 2001). By analyzing some regular phenomena of Chinese synaesthesia and comparing them with the regular phenomena of English synaesthesia analyzed by Sean Day (1996), we find the regular pattern of synaesthesia shared by the two languages.Aiming at the limitations of previous researches, the thesis deals with the experiential basis, nature, causes and functions of synaesthesia from a cognitive perspective, and gives a cognitive account of the sensory transferring direction and the different frequency of the use of the five senses. Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory are applied to expound the nature of synaesthesia, and the explanatory power of these two theories is compared.According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff & Johnson, synaesthesia is a kind of metaphor, and both of its source domain and target domain are perceptual. The nature of synaesthesia is to understand and experience one sense in terms of another. The synaesthetic expressions in language are the realization or manifestation of such metaphor. Construction of synaesthesia involves mappings of properties between two perceptual domains. As the two domains are not equal, the cross-domain mapping is unidirectional. According to Conceptual Blending Theory proposed by Fauconnier, construction process of synaesthesia is a process of conceptual blending, in which the input mental spaces are perceptual. The synaesthetic meaning is constructed by projecting partial structures of the input spaces to a blend. Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory complement each other in explaining synaesthesia: the former reveals the metaphorical nature of synaesthesia, whose view of cross-domain mapping accounts for the regular sensory transferring pattern obtained by the empirical studies; the latter expounds the real-time construction process of synaesthesia.It is a cognitive principle for human beings to understand the unfamiliar, difficult, and abstract concepts in terms of the familiar, comprehensible, and concrete concepts. However, the conceptual domains involved in synaesthesia are the basic conceptual domains in the human sensori-motor system, which makes synaesthesia a special metaphor. Such peculiarity is manifested by the directionality of synaesthesia and the different frequency of use of the five senses in synaesthesia. The two factors constitute the regular sensory transferring pattern of synaesthesia.From the research, we find: (1) Sensory transferring of synaesthesia follows the direction from the lower senses to the higher senses, ranking as touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing; such a direction shows the cognitive principle. The empirical analysis of Chinese synaesthesia in the thesis provides further evidence for such a direction being cross-lingually universal. (2) Frequency of the use of the five senses is different, and the notable frequency is: the sense of hearing outstrips the other senses as the most common to which to attach metaphors; the sense of touching is the most common sense in which things are expressed; although smelling is a low sense, the frequency of the use of smelling as the source sense is the lowest; although vision is a high sense, the frequency of the use of vision as source sense is very high. (3) The regular sensory transferring pattern of synaesthesia shows the embodied degree and characteristics of the five senses, i.e., senses with more embodiment are more likely to be used to experience and understand senses with less embodiment.The research is valuable in three aspects: firstly, the empirical study in the thesis is of great significance to inquire into the general character of synaesthesia in different languages; secondly, it helps people have a clearer and more comprehensive understanding about synaesthesia from a cognitive perspective; thirdly, it proves that the cognitive view of language is right and it is supposed to be a promoter of the development of cognitive linguistics.