Contrastive Study Of Metaphoric Phenomenon Interms Of Tactile Adjectives In Chinese And Japanese

The five senses refer to the sense of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste, which is human’s basic physical experience to learn about the world. And we interact with the outside world through our body to acquire cognitive ability and experiences. Although tactile adjectives are limited both in Chinese and Japanese, they are rich in linguistic expression by using the way of synaesthesia and metaphor. For instance,"rou ruan de wei dao" in Chinese which means a sense of softness, and "xin li yang yang de" means tickle somebody’s heart are simple everyday phrases in Chinese. The purpose of this paper is to find the similarities and differences of tactile adjectives in Chinese and Japanese and to study the psychological phenomenon of metaphor and synaesthesia by using the method of contrastive analysis.Firstly, this paper made an advance research discussion and then raised questions as well as research purposes. Secondly, the author tried to clear the definition of five senses and tactile sense with a description about their characteristics. According to the classification method by Murata Tadao(1989), we categorize tactile adjectives into four classes, they are the sense of warm, cold, touch and pain. And made a further analysis about the synaesthesia of the sense of vision, hearing, smell and taste step by step, and then made a contrastive study by comparing the usage of tactile adjectives between Chinese and Japanese. Tactile adjectives could to be used by people to modify five senses as well as psychological feelings, and start with this point, we made a study of metaphor expression related to tactile adjectives between the two languages from the view of feeling, state, nature, attitude and character.Through the research on this topic, it concluded that the compound tactile adjectives are mainly used in Chinese in the field of metaphor expression but Japanese are fond of the basic tactile adjectives. The tactile words such as warm, cold and touch adjectives are usually projected into the vision and hearing fields in both languages, whereas there is less projection occurred in the fields of smell and taste and hardly any such thing occurs in the pain domain. Besides, the metaphor expression about warm adjectives are abundant in Chinese and mostly have positive intonation, while in Japanese, it only used as modified words with negative meaning. In addition, tactile adjectives about "hua" which means slippy in Chinese, could be projected into the personality of human kind which denotes to a tricky people, but in Japanese, there are no such expressions.