A Cognitive Study Of Synesthesia In English And Chinese Basic Color Terms

This research takes six basic color terms from Chinese and English as research objects and twelve self-built corpora as material sources to compare and contrast the similarities and differences of synesthesia in Chinese and English basic color terms,attempting to explore their possible reasons.The six basic color terms are chosen based on document research,such as black,white,red,yellow,green and blue.In the existing researches,there is no research on synesthesia based on these six basic color terms.This thesis offers a new idea to study synesthesia and enriches the cognitive researches on synesthesia in color terms.After analyzing synesthesia in English and Chinese basic color terms,the findings of this research are as follows.In the first place,there are nine major types of synesthesia and 14 sub-types of synesthesia in all the corpora.Chinese basic color terms cover seven major types and 11 sub-types while English basic color terms contain eight major types and twelve subtypes.There exist overlapping types of synesthesia and special synesthetic examples both in Chinese and English.In the second place,there are two similarities in each pair of English and Chinese basic color terms.First,there is at least one same type of synesthesia in each pair.For example,the corpus HONG and RED both include inter-sight synesthesia,touch-color synesthesia and time-color synesthesia.Second,there are at least two synesthetic examples which are similar in form and in meaning in each pair of English and Chinese basic color terms,like dark red and??,flashing red and??,deep red and??in the corpus RED and the corpus HONG.Besides similarities,two major differences of synesthesia are seen in each pair of Chinese and English basic color terms.The first difference is that there is at least one special type only found in Chinese or English.Take the corpus RED and the corpus HONG as an example again.Time-color synesthesia is only seen in the corpus HONG while soundcolor synesthesia is only found in the corpus RED.The second difference is that several special synesthetic examples are only noticed in Chinese,such as???and??.They are different in form but they both belong to brightness-color synesthesia.The phrase structure of“ABB”is rarely seen in English,like???and???.Finally,there are indeed similarities and differences between Chinese color terms and English color terms.Three similarities are summarized in the research.First,synesthesia appears both in Chinese and English.The common synesthetic physiological basis of human beings may account for it.Second,taste-color synesthesia and color-smell synesthesia are seldom seen in both Chinese and English.The diagram made by Williams may explain this.Third,sound and color can be the source sense and target sense for each other.Williams' diagram may also give the possible explanation for that.What is more,synesthesia of time and color has something in common with synesthesia of sound and color.The possible reason might be that time is a mental sense which may lie in a higher position than color does.Two differences between Chinese basic color terms and English basic color terms are presented in this research.First,from the perspective of the frequency of each type of synesthesia,synesthesia of ? has the highest frequency,followed by ?,?,?,? and ? while synesthesia of yellow shows the lowest frequency in English.The different cultures of color might be the reason for this.Second,from the view of synesthetic types,the color ? has the most synesthetic types in all six Chinese basic color terms,followed by ?/?,?,?/?.This sequence is quite similar to the developmental sequence of each Chinese basic color term.That might be the reason for this.As for English basic color terms,except for yellow,other five color terms share the same number of types.The reason for this needs more study.