A Corpus-based Cognitive Study Of Chinese Auditory Synaesthetic Metaphors

Auditory sense,as one of the basic human feelings,is the main way for humans to conduct all activities of “sound”.In a variety of external stimuli within a certain distance,the“sound” is most likely to attract people's attention and also can improve the sensitivity of the feelings.Most linguistic studies of auditory sense have analyzed their linguistic features from the rhetorical perspective,so their forms are relatively simple.Therefore,it is of great significance to apply the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson,and use a large number of instances from CCL modern Chinese corpus to interpret the intercommunication and displacement between auditory and other senses cognitively.This study collects 38752 instances of “sound” as the search term from modern Chinese corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University and there are 2646 examples of Chinese auditory synaesthetic metaphors through manual screening.In the collected corpus,the number of sensory adjectives accounted for most of the proportion,so this study only discusses examples of sensory adjectives.We use the methods of corpus analysis and comparative analysis to study Chinese auditory synaesthetic metaphors.This study mainly solves the following three questions:(1)what are the types of Chinese auditory synaesthetic metaphors with “sound” as the search term;(2)what are the cognitive motivations of Chinese auditory synaesthetic metaphors with “sound” as the search term;(3)what are the mapping rule of Chinese auditory synaesthetic metaphors.The main findings of this study include: first,the main types are single synaesthetic metaphor and mixed synaesthetic metaphor.There are three main forms of single synaesthetic metaphor: auditory sense and tactile sense,auditory sense and taste sense,auditory sense and visual sense.The mixed synaesthetic metaphor includes four combinations: auditory sense,tactile sense and taste sense;auditory sense,tactile sense and visual sense;auditory sense,taste sense and visual sense;auditory sense,tactile sense,taste sense and visual sense.While,there no smell sense appears among auditory synaesthetic metaphors collected in the CCL modern Chinese corpus.Secondly,the cognitive motivations presented by auditory synaesthetic metaphors have universal cognitive similarity and cognitive prominence.Psychological similarity and cognitive diversity of the mixed synaesthetic metaphor is stronger than that of single synaesthetic metaphor.The construction of auditory synesthetic metaphor must notonly satisfy its cognitive similarity,cognitive diversity,but also be restricted and influenced by human emotional experience and psychological states.Thirdly,single synaesthetic metaphor only have a single source domain;while,mixed synaesthetic metaphor can have more than one source domain.Mapping of two types of auditory synaesthetic metaphors is directional,unitary and irreversible.The mapping process is from the more specific conceptual domain to the more abstract conceptual domain.In mixed synaesthetic metaphors,although visual sense is widely recognized as the most complex and high-level sense,the lower-level words of visual sense can modify the “sound” of the auditory domain and transmit the semantic meanings of visual sense to the auditory domain.