Construction Of Sensory Transfer Model Of Gustatory And Olfactory-synaesthetic Metaphor And English-chinese Comparative Study

Synaesthesia is metaphorical. It is a linguistic phenomenon and at the same time acts as a mode of thinking. Based on previous studies, this thesis examines, refines and compares English-Chinese gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic metaphors by means of data, and further puts forward Gustatory and Olfactory Sensory Transfer Model (GO-STM for short) with specific data distribution.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to relative studies of synaesthesia. Then, it presents the object, purpose and approach adopted for this thesis.Chapter 2 reviews the research background and presents a new hypothesis. (1) In terms of English synaesthesia, for example, Ullmann and Williams have concluded the"hierarchical distribution", i.e., synaesthetic transfers from the"lower"to the"higher"sensory modes; Day puts his interest in the connection of neurology and linguistics; (2) with Chinese synaesthesia, for instance, Zhao Yanfang has also illustrated her viewpoint for synaesthesia; Meng Xiaoxi has designed her STM based on Chinese poetry. However, their researches lack in the detail illustration, sufficiency of data and discussion on gustatory and olfactory synaesthesia. What's more, up to now, there's no comparative study between English and Chinese in these two aspects.Chapter 3 inputs the gustatory and olfactory words collected from Thesaurus, Dictionary of Modern Chinese Classification (1998) (《现代汉语分类词典》(1998)) and Modern Chinese Dictionary (the 5th Edition) (《现代汉语词典》(第五版)) into British National Corpus (BNC), State Language Committee Corpus and Modern Chinese Corpus of Peking University with the results as the following table shows: What's more, we classify, induce and analyze the 197 (81+116) synaesthetic metaphors collected.Chapter 4 constructs GO-STM to illustrate the gustatory and olfactory synaesthesia of English and Chinese in order to bridge the gap left by previous studies. It is found that the gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic mechanism is similar between English and Chinese with slight difference in specific linguistic expressions and frequency.Chapter 5 summarizes the achievements of this thesis as the three following points:1. The thesis is the first monograph of gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic metaphors based on a self-closed corpus. What's more, the comparative study of English and Chinese has also been conducted.2. It constructs GO-STM based on data in accounting for gustatory and olfactory synaesthesia, with percentage of English (48.1%) and Chinese (48.3%) gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic dead metaphors.3. It elucidates the embodiment basis of synaesthesia in terms of Cognitive Linguistics and Neurology.In addition, this chapter also suggests the limitation of the present study and puts forward suggestions for further study.