A Study Of Synaesthetic Metaphors In Kenji Miyazawa's Poetry From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Kenji Miyazawa was a famous Japanese poet and writer in the Showa period.In his short life,he produced a large number of works,especially poems,which are said to be more than a thousand in number.The term "synaesthesia" is usually considered as a rhetorical technique,and most of the previous studies have elaborated the phenomenon of synaesthesia from a rhetorical perspective.In this paper,we do not adopt the traditional rhetorical approach,but use Fauconnier's and Turner's conceptual integration theory in cognitive linguistics to investigate the cognitive mechanism of generic metaphors in Kenji Miyazawa's poetry using both qualitative and quantitative methods.The following questions are addressed:(1)What are the main originating domains and the main target domains of generic metaphors in Kenji Miyazawa's poetry? What is the overall trend of migration?(2)What are the lexical characteristics of the generic metaphors constructed by Kenji Miyazawa?(3)How are the generic metaphors in Miyazawa's poetry constructed?In this paper,143 metaphors were collected from the entire collection of poems "Spring and Asura" written by Miyazawa Kenji during his lifetime:(1)The main origin domain of sensory metaphors in Miyazawa Kenji's poems is touch,and the main target domain is vision,and there is an overall tendency of sensory migration from the lower to the higher sensory domains.(2)Kenji Miyazawa tends to use adjectives and onomatopoeic words,as well as words with specific semantic features as modifying components,and the things being modified are mainly various natural imagery.(3)The meaning construction of generic metaphors is achieved by activating two or more mental spaces and processing them integrally.