English And Chinese Synaesthesia: A Cognitive And Comparative Approach

Synaesthesia is generally regarded as a kind of rhetorical device. It means the use of metaphor in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds. Since the publication of Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980), many scholars have retrospected and criticized the traditional theory of rhetoric, and the cognitive approaches have been introduced into the study of synaesthetic metaphors. However, western scholars focus on the English language, namely that their data are drawn from a single language on most occasions, while Chinese scholars mainly probe into the cognitive rules of synaesthetic metaphors. It is still unknown whether their research results are universally significant in different languages and cultures. Therefore, the cognitive approach to synaesthetic metaphor has reached a point where it has to be supported by sound evidence provided by cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research. Based on the previous researches, this thesis attempts to analyze synaesthesia in light of Lakoff & Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and regards it as a cognitive phenomenon by nature. Moreover, on the basis of linguistic data collected from literary works, dictionaries and everyday language, this thesis shows a comparative study between English and Chinese Synaesthesia. Finally, the author analyzes the applications of synaesthesia in the fields of advertisements, teaching and translation.Synaesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon of human beings. In essence, syaesthetic metaphor is the mapping between or among the five senses (hearing, vision, smell, taste and touch). This kind of mapping is basically unidirectional in that it is likely to involve projection from low-grade sense organs to more advanced sense organs. Besides, such mappings are not arbitrary, but are grounded in the body and in our everyday experiences and language. Abundant examples are provided showing that there are far more similarities between English and Chinese synaesthetic metaphors than there are differences, which mainly result from cognitive universality of human beings. What's more, our research finds that synaesthesia is pervasive in our social life and we are often adopting it, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, an in-depth study of synaesthesia from a cognitive perspective is not only theoretically significant, but also valuable in practice.