Diachronic Semantic Change Of The Chinese Gustatory Adjective Suān:A Synaesthetic Metaphorical Perspective

Metaphor plays an important role in the process of semantic change and semantic innovation.For the past few decades,many scholars have been devoted to investigating synaesthetic metaphor and have found that synaesthetic metaphor conforms to a regular transfer pattern.However,apart from Williams’(1976)diachronic study of semantic change of English synaesthetic words based on synaesthetic metaphor,no research explored the semantic change of Chinese synaethetic words from the same perspective.Adopting conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework,the present study aims to explore the diachronic semantic change of Chinese gustatory adjective suan from the perspective of synaesthetic metaphor and to investigate if its synaesthetic transfers are consistent with the pattern observed by former researchers.Data were collected from the Center of Chinese Linguistics(CCL),and they were interpreted by three Chinese native speakers at the levels of double-character word,multi-character word and sentence.The results of this study are:1)In the process of semantic change,suan is given different semantic extensions respectively in Ancient Chinese,Medieval Chinese and Modern Chinese;2)Suan,originally referring to the sense domain of TASTE,undergoes the synaesthetic transfer to describe the sense modalities of SMELL,PAIN,EMOTION,TOUCH,SIGHT and SOUND gradually;which is consistent with the previous transfer pattern(i.e.lexemes tend to transfer from the lower senses to the most differentiated senses);3)Along with the semantic extensions of suan,its sense domain of TASTE transfers back to the sensory modality of TOUCH.The fact that this word meaning(cold)does not vanish as time goes on falsifies the hypothesis proposed by Williams(1976);4)Meanings tend to transfer from concrete to abstract and from external(sociophysical)to internal(emotional and psychological).