A Corpus-based Study Of Gustatory Words:Sweet, Sour And Bitter In English And Chinese From A Cognitive Perspective

The present thesis adopts a cognitive approach based on corpus study to the research of the words "tian","suan","ku" in Chinese and their counterparts sweet, sour and bitter in English contrastively in an attempt to find out the working mechanism of synaesthetic metaphor and the projection of gustatory words onto other domains, especially onto sense domains.Since the publication of Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M.’s Metaphors We Live by (1980), the cognitive approaches have been introduced into the study of synaesthetic metaphors to replace the traditional way in which synaesthesia is generally regarded as a kind of rhetorical device. In this thesis, the study of abundant examples provided mainly from the CCCL corpus and BNC shows those Chinese gustatory words and their counterparts in English share more commonness than differences. In daily expressions, synaesthesia is as ubiquitous as other kinds of metaphor and systematic expressions rooted in conceptual metaphors like HARD EXPRERIENCE IS BITTER can be found on the language level. The similarity is motivated by the physical and physiological foundation and universe cognitive model.Further research shows that based on the universality of cognition, people’s perception on the basic gustatory senses are the same, but the synaesthetic metaphors originated from these basic gustatory sense differ from each other in the possibility and frequency of usage in certain expressions. Different thinking modes and culture background are accounted for the poverty of mapping, different elaboration of conceptual metaphors and varied interpretation of the same metaphor. The present thesis also adopts the widely-accepted understanding mechanisms, namely, property comparison model, property categorization model and blending theory to testify synaesthetic metaphor and find that despite some of the rules applies to the synaesthetic metaphor, there are features belong to synaesthetic metaphor alone. Usually, the projection of the metaphor from the source domain to the target domain is selective or structural, however, the projection of synaesthetic metaphor is complete and wholly. At the same time, the syntactic and semantic features of synaesthetic metaphors are examined in the thesis. It is found that, take bitter as an example,"ku" in Chinese can only be used as a modifier of coldness while in English it can be used synaesthetically to refer to coldness. The similarities as well as differences of these three pairs of gustatory words are studied contrastively in a cognitive approach in order to reveal the underlying cause so that language learners or translators will be aware of the differences between the two languages caused the cognitive differences.Synaesthetic metaphors are based on the mapping of the image schema of sensory image (here specifically refers to gustatory image) onto other cognition fields. The universality of cognition would mean the similarity of the source domain of the synaesthetic metaphors while the cause of the difference of the target domain must be caused by the mapping process. So mapping process was studied in the research.The current thesis bears importance in the understanding of synaesthetic metaphors and underlying cognitive basis of synaesthesia. On the theoretical level, it will enrich the study of synaesthetic research and help reveal the vain of synaesthesia. It provides a new angle to the exploration of the relations between language, culture and mind and also supports and reinforces the modern cognitive theory of metaphor proclaimed first by Lakoff and Johnson. On the practical level, the thesis would help language workers grab the essence of synaesthetic metaphors and improve their language learning and teaching and, finally, improve their language proficiency. It will make cross-cultural communication more effective.