A Cognitive Perspective On The Synaesthetic Metaphors

Synaesthesia is regarded as a figure of speech in traditional rhetoric. With the publication of Metaphors We Live by written by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, people realized that synaesthesia is not only a figure of speech, but also a special form of metaphor and it is the cognitive model of humans’ thinking and action and the tool for humans to understand their surroundings and form concepts. At the linguistic level, it refers to the metaphor of using one sensory word to describe other sensations. At the conceptual level, the nature of it is to use one sensation to understand the other sensations.The thesis selects the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty as its research object, which is one of the most popular and influential readers in the poetry of the Tang dynasty. At the very beginning, we pick out all synaesthetic verses and then classify the sensual projections according to the following order which serve as the source domains: Vision, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch and Temperature. Finally, we depict the sensory transferring model and count the frequency of the six sensory modalities. According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson and the Conceptual Blending Theory by Fauconnier and Turner, the thesis analyzes the nature of the synaesthetic metaphors from the cognitive point of view and attempts to reveal the relation between language and mind. Based on all of these, the paper investigates the transferring preference of poets and compare it with the rules that have been concluded in English in order to find out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in cognition.According to our investigation, firstly, we find that sensory transferring of synaesthesis follows the direction from the lower senses to the higher senses, ranking as Temperature, Touch, Taste, Smell, Hearing and Vision. Such a cognitive rule from easier to more complex or from lower to higher conforms with our cognitive principle. The empirical analysis of Chinese synaesthesia in this thesis provides further evidence for such a direction being cross-linguistically universal. Secondly, frequency of the use of the six sensory modalites is different. Temperature is the most common sensation as the source domain while the frequency of the use of the sensation of hearing and vision as target domains is the highest. Thirdly, though the use of synaesthetic metaphors is different from poet to poet, the frequency of the use of “ ”(coldness) and its synonyms in the temperature domain and “ ”(bitterness) in the taste domain are relatively high. When the poets expressed their unpleasant and depressed inner feelings, they tended to use metaphorical synaesthesia. Fourthly, there are far more similarities than differences in synaesthetic metaphors between English and Chinese.