A Cognitive Study On Synaesthetic Metaphors In Shelley’s Poems

This thesis attempts to investigate synaesthesia, which is an idiosyncratic kind ofmetaphor. From the cognitive perspective, the author of this thesis explores thespecific metaphor and illustrates that this metaphorical phenomenon is embodied inthe human cognition, which can be used as a tool for human beings to get correctunderstanding of the world and form authentic conceptions from aspects of cognitivelinguistics.For a long while, the synaesthetic phenomenon has been perceived as a curiosityand researched from a variety of perspectives by massive experts at home and abroad.Currently, synaesthesia has been a sanguine and promising multi-disciplinary researchfield which is concerned with many other subjects. As the development and progressof the research in cognitive linguistics, synaesthesia cannot only be considered as arhetorical device, but also a basic mode of thoughts and action in the cognitivemanner, which is featured with mapping between two different sensorial fields, oramong more fields.Shelley is one of the brilliant and influential representatives of Romanticism. Theprevious study on his poems stressed on the themes and contents, while the currentresearch attempts to focus on the cognitive mechanism contained in the synaestheticmetaphors. Depending on the Conceptual Blending Theory of Fauconnier and Turner,with qualitative and quantitative approaches, this thesis conducts a large-scaleresearch of Synaesthesia through the poems of Shelley, in which the following itemsare analyzed:Item1: What are the main types of the manifestation of synaesthetic metaphorsin Shelley’s poems?Item2: What is the main tendency of synaesthetic metaphor transferencerepresented in Shelley’s poems?Item3: How could Shelley create the structure or what is the construction process of synaesthetic metaphors appeared in Shelley’s poems?As far as the whole structure of the thesis is concerned, this thesis is made up ofsix chapters. Chapter One is a laconic introduction which outlined the key researchquestions, methodology, source of data, the significance and research design. ChapterTwo is concerned with a detailed presentation of the related literature, and it indicatesthat former researches tend to focus on the cognitive universality, lacking of researchon its generation mechanism. Chapter Three concentrates on the theoretical work ofthe current thesis, the Fauconnier&Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory. ChapterFour and Five are the main body of this thesis. The former one brings about thespecific exploration on synaesthetic metaphor in the poems of Shelley from theperspective of cognitive linguistics: the dominant source, target and the mappingdirection. Based on the theoretical framework noted above, the latter chapter, ChapterFive attempts to interpret broadly the construction of synaesthesia existed in thepoems of Shelley. Chapter Six concludes the major findings, outcome, limitations andsuggestions.The main achievements concluded in Chapter six can be presented as thefollowing points:1. In this thesis, some representative poems of Shelley has been selected, andaccording to the data statistics, manifestation of Synaesthesia in it can be classifiedinto three catagories: synaesthesia of hearing as the target domain, synaesthesia ofvision as the target domain, synaesthesia transferred from gustation to olfactorysensation, synaesthesia of the mapping among more than three sensations.2. Based on the classification, the author of this thesis probed into thisphenomenon and found the transfer tendency in Shelley’s poem is not random, and"upward tendency" is the significant and pervasive type.3. This thesis applied the Conceptual Blending Theory to elucidate theconstruction process of the synaesthesia in Shelley’s poems. Conceptual BlendingTheory is a theory which includes a complicated cognitive process and can bereasonable account for some novel and creative expressions. Moreover, it canillustrate the construction mechanism of synaesthetic metaphors more clearly.