A Cognitive Study Of Synaesthetic Metaphors In Keats's Poems From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending

Synaesthesia as a distinctive kind of metaphor has always been a research interest for linguists.Traditionally,synaesthesia is referred to as a rhetorical device.A lot of scholars study synaesthesia from lexical perspective.As the theory of cognitive linguistics developed,synaesthesia is not only considered as a rhetorical device,but also a basic way of thinking by the cognitive linguists.Among all the genres of literature,poetry is most likely to provide accessible sources for synaesthesia studies.John Keats was a representative figure of English romantic literature.The poetry of Keats is characterized by rich sensual images and use of synaesthetic metaphors.The aesthetic and the political-historical method have long dominated the criticism of John Keats' s poetry.The present research is dedicated to making further,empirical investigations into the synaesthestic metaphors in Keats' s poems using the cognitive theory CBT and may offer a new approach to study Keats' s works from the cognitive perspective and shed light on studies of Keats' s writing style from a cognitive perspective.The research first presents the characteristics of synaesthetic metaphors in Keats' s poems including predominant source and target domains and transfer tendency through quantitative and qualitative analysis.Then the construction process of synaesthetic metaphors will be analyzed by CBT.In order to achieve the above objectives,research questions are set as follows:(1)What are the main characteristics including the predominant domains and transfer tendency of synaesthetic metaphors in Keats' s Poems?(2)What is the construction process of synaesthetic metaphors in his poems based on Conceptual Blending Theory?In order to settle the above research questions,the author collects 105 synaesthetic metaphors from Keats: The Complete Poems and adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data.Quantitative analysis is employed to obtain the frequency of the occurrence of all types of synaesthetic metaphors.Qualitative analysis is used to summarise the characteristics of synaesthetic transfer.Conclusions can be drawn based on the analysis:First,the upward tendency of synaesthetic transfer identified in Keats' s poems abides by the hierarchical distribution proposed by Ullmann.The predominant source and target domains are touch and hearing respectively,which is also consistent with Ullmann's research findings.Secondly,this thesis also proved strong explanatory power of CBT for the construction of synaesthetic metaphors form a cognitive perspective.A perceptual source and target functioned as input mental spaces.The generic space connects the images of these two separate spaces(senses)and makes the images of the two input spaces(senses)cross-mapped to each other.The blend space creates new images that do not exist in either of the two inputs alone.