A Study On The Construction Of Conceptual Integration Mechanism For English Metaphorical Synaesthesia

There exists interlaced psychological embodiment among a human being’s five senses of sight,sound,smell,taste and touch gained in daily life,which can be reflected by the linguistic representation with experience and impressions belonging to a sensory domain describing the current feelings belonging to another one.Thus a sort of delicate,incisive and eye-catching expression paradigm,synaesthesia,can be formed.At the outset,synaesthesia was studied in academia chiefly from the aspects of neurophysiology,traditional rhetoric and literature,which verified the rationality and universality of the existence of synaesthetic phenomena.Afterwards,the cognitive linguists proposed the deep identity of it,i.e.imperative metaphorical tool for getting acquainted with the world.Despite of some scholars’researches on it based on conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual integration theory(CIT for short)and their achievements on cognitive factors implied in it,the conceptual integration model peculiar to the semantic processing process of metaphorical synaesthesia has almost never been put forward and the cognitive mechanism behind it is still worthy of further exploration.In view of this,the dissertation collects a total of 301 synaesthetic corpus from monographs related to synaesthesia at home and abroad,articles in core journals and domestic dissertations of master and doctor.And the predominant source domain,predominant target domain and the overall transferring tendency are excavated,which verify Ullmann’s research achievement about the cognitive universality of synaesthesia.And under the guiding principles of cognitive linguistics,the present study attempts to construct visible conceptual integration mechanism(CIM for short)for metaphorical synaesthesia with the purpose of presenting the real-time online process of meaning construction of it and digging out the motivation and inner mechanism of metaphorical synaesthesia’s generation.Furthermore,multifarious construals are applied in the dissertation to investigating the close interrelationship among synaesthetic language,human being’s cognition and the reality,which aims to offer a more profound and accurate understanding of metaphorical synaesthesia to people.Major findings of the dissertation are presented as following:Firstly,seventeen mapping subgroups are discovered in the 301 synaesthetic instances,the three main ones are sight→sound~1mapping type,touch→sound mapping type and touch→sight mapping type.Therefore,the predominant source and target domain are touch and sound respectively.The overall transferring tendency is upwards,i.e.it tends to transfer from the lower modalities to the higher ones.The above findings are all in correspondence with Ullmann’s findings on the cognitive universality of synaesthesia.Secondly,the dissertation constructs multidimensional conceptual integration models for English metaphorical synaesthesia thus excavates that conceptual integration theory has a strong explanatory power on this emergent expression of synaesthesia.Metaphorical synaesthesia refers to the mapping from one sensory domain(source)to another sensory domain(target),the two different sensory domains can activate different input spaces in a cognitive subject’s mind.On the ground of the cross-space mapping relation between perceivers,sensory organs,perceptions,perceived objects and the information gained from them,the cognitive subject projects the related elements with the aid of contextual filter.Thus the emergent structure of a synaesthesia can be born in blended space.Thirdly,the dissertation detects divergent construals can elaborate the projecting processes of conceptual integration network for metaphorical synaesthesia.The projection of two perceivers is indeed the process of specified representation of the cognitive subject,who selects the processes of perceptions in two original spaces by virtue of windowing different phases of the two perception event frames.In terms of information gained from the perceived objects,the cognitive subject utilizes a construal of figure and ground,profiling,mental scanning,viewing frame or objectivity and subjectivity for highlighting the information concerned with the emergent structure according to features of synaesthesia mapped to five different senses.Fourthly,the dissertation carves out that,as a metaphorical cognitive device,synaesthesia is able to enhance the degree of accessibility of the information belonging to target sense on the one hand,and can convey the language users’subjective feelings to a certain objective thing vividly and verily on the other hand,which verify the fact that synaesthetic expressions are the outcome of the interaction between five sensory systems.While the CIM constructed by the present study can supply an effective cognitive reference to the foreign language learners and facilitate the teaching effects of English synaesthesia.