A Contrastive Study Of The Cognitive Modes Of Synaesthesia In English And Chinese

The present research focuses on a special kind of metaphor: synaesthesia—the metaphor in which terms related to one kind of sensation are used to describe sensations of other kinds. The peculiarity of synaesthetic metaphor lies in that the source domain and the target domain of the metaphor are both sensations.Since ancient times, synaesthesia has been considered as a curiosity and interpreted by numerous researchers, western and eastern, from various perspectives. Nowadays, synaesthesia becomes a promising multi-disciplinary research field that concerns itself with physiology, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, aesthetic, literature, rhetoric, semantics, cognitive linguistics, etc. Synaesthesia is not only a linguistic phenomenon or a figure of speech, but an important and fundamental mode of cognition shared among human beings. It was posed (Ullmann, 1951; Day, 1996) that synaesthetic metaphors are not arbitrary, but tend to mount from the lower to the higher reaches of the sensorium, or from the less differentiated sensations to the more differentiated ones. However, the above hypothesis is drawn only from several indo-European languages and is in desperate need of multilingual verification. Meanwhile, most previous studies focus on the cognitive universals of synaesthesia; few of them pay attention to the cultural peculiarities of synaesthesia, and fewer still to the contrast of synaesthetic metaphor across the western and the eastern cultures.To fill these research gaps, the present research initiates a large-scale contrastive study of synaesthesia between English and Chinese poetry, in which the following issues are explored: (1) the cognitive universals of synaesthesia; (2) the cultural peculiarities of synaesthesia; (3) the cognitive mechanism and epistemological implication of synaesthesia; (4) the influence of aesthetic and philosophical traditions upon synaesthesia. The theoretical framework adopted in the present research is the Embodied Philosophy and the metaphor theory put forward by the contemporary American linguists and philosophers Lakoff and Johnson.Based on linguistic facts, the present research employs a multi-disciplinary empirical methodology, which combines both inductive and deductive methods, and also, both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The English materials used in this research are primarily classic British poetic works, ranging from the 16th C. to the 19th C.; the Chinese materials are mainly classic poetic works in Tang Dynasty. A small portion of the synaesthetic data comes from daily language. The research is carried out in the following steps: firstly, authentic synaesthetic metaphors of English and Chinese are collected from the above mentioned poetic materials; secondly, synaesthetic metaphors drawn from the materials (516 English instances and 510 Chinese instances) are grouped into sub-categories according to different source-target collocations of the synaesthetic transfer; finally, from the statistics, the universalities and peculiarities of synaesthesia in English and Chinese will be elicited, upon which further analysis and discussion are grounded.The major findings of the present research are as follows:1. The prominent cognitive universals of synaesthetic metaphor.The research results lend support to Ullmann's hypothesis that synaesthetic metaphors are not arbitrary, but tend to mount from the lower to the higher reaches of the sensorium, or from the less differentiated sensations to the more differentiated ones. This"upward"tendency of synaesthetic transfer can be accounted for by the general tendency of metaphorical transfer indicated by Lakoff and Johnson, that is, in a metaphorical transfer, it's more likely for a less complicated concept (source domain) to be mapped onto a more complicated one (target domain), but not vice versa. It is shown in the statistics that Touch and Vision are predominant source sensations of synaesthetic metaphor in both English and Chinese, while Hearing and Vision are predominant target sensations in both languages, and that the 8 predominant types of synaesthesia amount to 82.6% of the total instances in English and 90.2% in Chinese. 2. The distinct cultural peculiarities of synaesthetic metaphor.Though constrained by prominent cognitive universals, synaesthetic metaphors in English and Chinese exhibit distinct cultural peculiarities at the same time. It is found in the present research that English and Chinese differ significantly in the ranking of source sensations of synaesthetic metaphor: the most important source of synaesthesia in English is Touch, while that in Chinese turns out to be Temperature. Moreover, the typical synaesthetic associations in English and Chinese are in sharp contrast: the preferred synaesthetic associations in English are"rich"senses, while those in Chinese are"light"ones.3. The cognitive mechanism and epistemological implication of synaesthetic metaphor.Drawing insights from previous studies, the present research makes further inquiries into the cognitive mechanism of synaesthetic metaphor. It is first advanced in the present research that synaesthesia is too complicated to be accounted for by a single cognitive mechanism, but motivated by different mechanisms. Synaesthetic metaphors basically fall into three categories, i.e., schema-based synaesthesia, affection-based synaesthesia, and concurrence-based synaesthesia. It is also argued in this dissertation that synaesthetic metaphor is neither"conceptual metaphor", as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), nor"primary metaphor", as defined by Grady (1997), but a more fundamental type of metaphor, which could be entitled"primitive metaphor". As the most primitive category of metaphors discovered so far, synaesthetic metaphor bridges up our perceptual experiences characterized by different sensations, and consequently provides the possibility for further categorization and conceptualization of human experiences, and the basis for thoughts of increasing complexity and abstraction. Synaesthetic metaphor is significant in epistemology and philosophy, because it is in synaesthetic metaphor that we see most clearly the embodied nature of metaphorical similarity, which is extremely helpful for us to have a better understanding of the relationships between perception and conception, and between experience and knowledge. 4. The aesthetic and philosophical roots of the cultural peculiarities of synaesthetic metaphor.As stated above, the typical synaesthetic associations in English and Chinese are in sharp contrast: the preferred synaesthetic associations in English are"rich"senses, while those in Chinese are"light"ones—the former arises from the sensual characteristics of the western sense of beauty, while the later originates from the"light"and suggestive style of the Chinese sense of beauty. This contrast of"richness"and"lightness"between western and Chinese aesthetic traditions can be further traced down to the different traditions of the western philosophy and the Chinese philosophy. It can be drawn from the present research that cultural variables, especially aesthetic tastes and philosophical traditions, have so strong an impact even on synaesthesia, which is usually considered to be largely subject to the physiological basis and cognitive universals shared by all human beings.The originality of the present research lies in these aspects: (1) it provides the first large-scale empirical investigation and analysis of Chinese synaesthetic metaphor; (2) it is the first contrastive study of synaesthetic metaphor between the western and the eastern languages and cultures, and is therefore important in exploring the universals and peculiarities of the cognitive mode of synaesthesia; (3) it is a multi-disciplinary comprehensive exploration of synaesthesia, combining linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophy approaches. Despite various limitations, the present research, from the perspective of synaesthetic metaphor, makes further inquiries into the universals and peculiarities of human cognition, and the relationship between perception and conception, as well as the impact of different cultures upon language and cognition, whereby contributes to certain aspects of cognitive linguistics, contrastive linguistics and philosophy. In addition to its theoretical significance, the present research will also shed light on practical aspects, such as synaesthesia translation and cross-cultural communication.