A Study On Semantic Change And Synaesthetic Metaphor Of Chinese Temperature-sense Adjective "Leng"

Language never stops change and the changes are partly manifested by the diversification of word meaning.Among the factors resulting in semantic change,metaphor drives semantic change in a motivated way and provides a key to understand the phenomenon of semantic shift.(Saeed,2009)Synaesthetic metaphor,as a sub-type of metaphor,deals with metaphorical transfers among senses,leading to semantic change of sensory words.Williams(1976)studied semantic change of English sensory adjectives from the perspective of synaesthetic metaphor and put forward a law that synaesthetic metaphor transfers from the less differentiated senses to the more differentiated ones,and not vice versa.Comparatively,rare researches did the same exploitation on Chinese sensory adjectives.Langacker(1987)took touch as the primary sense of human beings and divided it into three sub-types: temperature,pressure and pain.Temperature-sense is composed of four parts: hot,warm,cool and cold.Each part involves numerous sensory adjectives,describing the experience human beings sensed.Meaning of these adjectives changes diachronically and part of the changes are presented by synaesthetic metaphors.“Leng”,as one of the typical adjectives in temperature-sense,changes flexibly with various meanings.To investigate semantic change and synaesthetic metaphor of “leng” not only helps understanding and application of “leng” in English-Chinese translation,language teaching and learning,but also fills the gap of similar studies on Chinese temperature-sense adjectives.Based on the theories of conceptual metaphor and synaesthetic metaphor,this thesis makes a comprehensive study on semantic change and synaesthetic metaphor of Chinese temperature-sense adjective “leng”.The research questions are: 1)what changes does the Chinese temperature-sense adjective “leng” undergo on account of word meaning? 2)What synaesthetic metaphors does “leng” involve? 3)What is thesynaesthetic transferring tendency of “leng”? Does it conform to the regularities previous studies proposed? If not,what are the peculiarities? In order to answer the three questions,the on-line corpus designed by Center for Chinese Linguistics,Peking University(CCL)is used to collect data.For the needs of a diachronic study,it takes“leng” as keyword,retrieves it in the corpus from the first citation to the present and analyzes each concordance no matter what styles of literature it belongs to.By deleting repeated ones,selecting qualified ones,100 examples conveying new meanings and synaesthetic metaphors are listed for detailed analysis.Major findings of the study are: 1)“leng” first appears as a phonetic loan character in the Spring and Autumn Period and gets the original meaning till the Warring States Period.2)Meaning of “leng” extends in every main stage,including Ancient Chinese,Medieval Chinese,Modern Chinese and Contemporary Chinese.“Leng” mostly indicates the original meaning,describing low temperature and something cold,being opposite to “warm” or “hot”.Being collocated with other words,“leng” tends to reveal a negative attitude toward the outside world.3)“Leng”,originally,belongs to the sense domain of TEMPERATURE,then metaphorically transfers to the sense domains of PAIN,SOUND,PRESSURE,VISION,SCENT and TASTE,which is not the same as Williams'(1976)synaesthetic transferring law in English synaesthetic adjectives(Figure 2.1)but conforms the mapping model of synaesthetic transfer in Mandarin(Zhao & Huang,2018)(Figure 2.2).4)The predominant target domain of synaesthetic metaphor of “leng” in each main stage is the same sense domain: VISION,while the least target domain is different in different stages.