A Study On The Metaphorical Meanings Of Sensory Verbs In Modern Chinese

Metaphor, a way of cognition, has a great effect on the mode of thinking and the languages of human beings. People use a lot of metaphors in everyday life. The essence of metaphor is that humans use one type of things to understand and experience another type of things. The similarities between the two types of things provide the possibility of a metaphor. Usually people tend to use things that are familiar, concrete and visible to learn and experience concepts that are unfamiliar, abstract and invisible. Humans learn about the world starting from learing themselves. The human body is the starting point of cognition. Through eyes, ears, mouth, nose and hands, people begin to find out what the world around them is like. The five sense organs are the base of all experiences that humans can acquire and accumulate. They are the premise of meaningful world. In modern Chinese, the meanings of sensory verbs are diverse. On the one hand, this is because the five sense organs have been playing a great role in the process of exploration and discovering. On the other hand, the rich meanings of sensory verbs can be credited to metaphors. Therefore, this paper has made a systematic research on the metaphorical meanings of sensory verbs in order to find out the development law of the meanings of these verbs and the cognitive rules of humans.This research focuses on the development of metaphorical meanings of sensory verbs. The sensory verbs mentioned mainly refer to the verbs that are used to indicate vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The research shows that the meanings of these verbs all map from sensory domain to the non-sensory domains of social relationship and mind (among which the metaphorical meanings of verbs of vision and smell in the intelligence and thought domain are the richest), which indicates the fact that human activities evolve from physical to mental. On the whole, the five sense organs all make great contributions to the advanced cognition activities of humans. However, the characteristics and functions of the five sense organs vary a lot, so there are many differences in their metaphorical meanings.