Comparative Research About Vision Metaphors In English And Chinese Under Synaesthesia

As a special phenomenon, synaesthesia derives from various sensory and perceptual interconnections of human beings. Traditionally, synaesthesia was considered as a modificatory method and used in poetry or literary works. With the development of cognitive science, synaesthesia has been proved to be a cognitive phenomenon and become an important cognitive method for people perceiving and cognizing the objective world. According to the existing body-knowledge, people's physical sensation is a complicated and integrated system. Although the physical sensations (including vision, hearing, olfaction, gustation, touch) always stay at their posts to do their duties, they aren't entirely separated from each other. They are interlinked with and interacted on each other. Among these sensations, vision is the most important one, which is used to observe the external things by humans, and it is also known as the major source for people to get the information about the outside world. But in daily linguistic phenomenon, we will frequently discover that lots of words originally are describing the visual category, with the extension and development of word meaning, they carry some non-visual metaphorical meanings with them. In this thesis the author would like to call these metaphorical meanings, which express the abstract concepts such as mind, emotion, intelligence and so on as "vision metaphor".This thesis firstly starts from the actual linguistic corpus, makes researches on the vision metaphors from metaphor theories adapting the beneficial achievements made by the former researchers, and tries to build a theoretical framework which could be illustrated by "metaphor construction diagram". Secondly on the basis of framework, this thesis, taking synaesthesia as the cognitive background, will explore the generating of synaesthesia. From the following different perspectives including visual sensory organ, visual physical condition (light), visual sensory activity and sensory capability, the author will also classify vision metaphors of English and Chinese, compare these two languages and try to find out the universality and diversity of vision metaphor between those two languages. Finally the tentative explanation for the universality and diversity of vision metaphor is given in this study.As the Exploration on this problem going on deeply, the author discovers:firstly "synaesthesia" originates from the sensory modality transfer in itself. Just like other metaphors, synaesthesia is also a metaphorical cognitive method, which is mainly expressed in the mapping process of sensory domains from one to another. According to the investigation about synaesthesia, Ullmann discovered the hierarchical distribution and the mapping rules in synaesthesia. After analyzing, the generating mechanism of synaesthesia is found out:under the certain circumstance, various sensory activities will possibly transfer to visual sensation, which is the most important sensation for people. This conclusion not only shows some connections between vision and synaesthesia, but also validates some scholars' (such as Ullmann, Li Guonan, Zhao Yanfang etc) viewpoints that vision is the most superlative, most important and most complicated sensory perception. Moreover this conclusion will provide the referenced basis for the future study about visual perceptual domain.Secondly, Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be used to understand the vision metaphor in linguistic corpus of English and Chinese. Vision metaphor express the meanings of visual category words or idioms are extended from the literal description of vision to non-visual abstract category; the underlying conceptual metaphor is EYE IS MIND, which is derived from the embodied experience that vision is the primary channel whereby human beings obtain the knowledge about the world. Just as Aristotle said, "All originate from eyes." Based on this analysis, shows that metaphor is a main rationale and motivation behind the semantic evolution and extension, which likes a bridge links our body, language and external world.Thirdly, after contrasting English and Chinese data, the author discovers vision metaphors in English and Chinese not only appear the similarities, but also display some differences. When exploring the reasons for these similarities and differences, it is found that they don't appear randomly, but originate from people's more or less the same physiological base, cognitive mechanism, bodily experience, cultural model and the cultural differences in different cultural contexts. And this finding also verifies Lakoff's view that "Metaphorical mappings vary in universality. Some seem to be universal, others are widespread, and some seem to be culture specific."(Lakoff,1993)On the whole, some insufficiencies still exist in this dissertation. Some conclusions also need to be verified by more specific researches on cross-culture and cross-linguistics.