The Study Of Synaesthesia From Cognitive Perspective

Not a single sensory organ reflects but more than one sensory organ reflectswhen human beings receive a stimulus from outside. All of us have known that wehuman beings have five sensory organs, auditory sense, visual sense, olfactory sense,gustatory sense and tactile sense. When one of the five senses receives a stimulus, inmany cases, other sensory organs can be influenced and react accordingly. But as forsynaesthesia, it just is a kind of integrated sense and a human beings’ reflection ofmultiple senses, getting a certain stimulus. And these kind of mixed senses have allfive of them, auditory sense, visual sense, olfactory sense, gustatory sense and tactilesense connected, which push the mutual boundaries and make synaesthesia have morepowerful expressions. By means of using the words belonging to one sense todescribe another sense, the fantastic and vivid results are made. In previous researches,synaesthesia tends to be studied as a rhetoric device. With the development ofcognitive linguistics especially Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theoryand Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory’s coming out, human have new ideasand methods to synaesthesia. Many scholars began to study it from the perspective ofcognition and obtained some achievement, but those researches still have the problemof not systematic enough and need to go further.In this thesis, the third and forth chapter are the core. In the third chapter, themain points are on the theoretical basis and foundation for studying the generation ofsynaesthesia. In it, there are two theories Conceptual Metaphor Theory andconceptual blending theory, which played important roles in studying synaesthesia.Besides, the constructive process of synaesthetic phenomenon and the similarities anddifferences of synaesthesia in Chinese and English are introduced in detail. In chapterfour, the classifications are taken in terms of whether the five senses are treated as asource domain and many examples in spoken language and in literary works are listedand studied, and the functions of synaesthesia are analyzed and summarized from theperspective of cognition.From the perspective of cognition, this paper mainly aims at the shortcomings ofthe previous studies and has research on synaesthesia phenomenon, includingPhysiological and Psychological Basis of synaesthesia’s creation, strong synaesthesiaand weak synaesthesia,construction and functions of synaesthesia. In the previous researches on synaesthesia,either Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory or Fauconnier’s ConceptualBlending Theory is singly studied by most scholars as the theoretical basis wheninterpreted and analyzed.This paper’s innovation is to study synaesthesia phenomenon by means of thecombination of the two theories and sketch the advantage and disadvantage of themwhen they are used to explain the synaesthesia phenomenon. By analyzing, it is found that the transferring among the different senses hasdirectivity and the frequency of each sensory organ’s appearance is different. All ofthese reflect the degree of the embodiment of all sensory organs, that is, human beingstend to use the senses which have a higher degree of the embodiment to understandthe senses that have the lower degree of the embodiment. According to collecting andanalyzing many specific examples that have not been mentioned by scholars, thestudies of synaesthetic phenomenon become more comprehensive. The study in thispaper explained the relationship between language and cognition and had some effecton the study of cognitive linguistics.