A Comparative Study On Chinese And English Synaesthetic Expressions With BM~+ Model From Embodied Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

Synaesthesia is a special language phenomenon created by mutual communication of the five sense organs?sight,hearing,touch,taste,smell?.It is treated as a rhetoric device,a kind of metaphor,and also a way of thinking and extensively studied by an increasing number of scholars.As a rhetoric device,it is widely accepted in creating literature works to color the literature world.As a metaphor,linguists,especially those cognitive linguists are mostly interested in the cognitive mechanism hiding behind it.Some of them even attempt to explore and expound the cognitive mechanism laying in it with Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Blending Theory.As a way of thinking,it is applied to art creation and architecture design,which provides continuous inspirations for the innovation.On the basis of the former studies,this thesis investigates the synaesthetic expressions in both Chinese and English poems of 20^thcentury from the Embodied Cognitive Linguistic perspective.Besides,the closed corpora of both Chinese?307?and English?108?are established to construct the sensory transfer model according to the sensory transfer tendency.Then,the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory are united,and the Sociality of Language is taken into consideration to rebuild a BM⁺Model?B represents Blending,M stands for Metaphor,“+”symbolizes Sociality of Language?to analyse and explicate the cognitive mechanism behind synaesthesia.This thesis also conducts a comparative study on the similarities and differences of embodiment and cognition between Chinese and English native speakers.The major contributions of this thesis lie in:1)Considering the Sociality of Language,this thesis tries to construct the BM⁺Model from the perspective of Embodied Cognitive Linguistics to do a qualitative research on expounding the cognitive mechanism of synaesthesia.2)This thesis establishes the closed corpora of Chinese and English with 307Chinese synaesthetic expressions and 108 English synaesthetic expressions in them separately.After the quantitative and comparative research,it is shown that the BM⁺Model has its feasibility in interpreting the working mechanism of synaesthesia.3)After classification and analysis of the Chinese and English corpora,the sensory transfer models of both Chinese and English are built,which reflect that the Chinese and English share almost the same sensory transfer tendency.The four sensations?touch,sight,hearing,and smell?can be source domains and target domains in both Chinese and English.Besides,the sensory transfer from touch to sight is the most frequent,and the sensory transfer from sound to sight ranks the second.The difference is that in English,there is no sensory transference from sight to taste and from smell to touch.According to the transfer frequency of the five sensations as target domains,the order in Chinese is sight>sound>touch>smell>taste;in English is sight>sound>smell>touch>taste.It may be found that both Chinese and English speakers share the similar physiology and the reality,while the nuance is produced because of the cognitive difference created by culture background,tradition,social background,age and so on.