Synaesthetic Metaphors In Li Qingzhao’s Ci Poems

Synaesthesia is regarded as a figure of speech which communicates different senses and arouses the sense transfer by association in rhetoric for many years.However,with the development of cognitive linguistics,synaesthesia is considered as a kind of special metaphor.In cognitive linguistics,synaesthesia is also named synaesthetic metaphor which is not only a pattern of language but also a pattern of our thoughts and behaviors.Previous studies on this issue have been based on the perspectives of rhetoric,semantics,and neuropsychology.Yet this approach has some disadvantages.On the one hand,it can’t explain the internal meaning construction of synaesthesia;on the other hand,it ignores the interaction between our mind and body in the environment.There are some scholars who try to use the Conceptual Metaphor Theory or the Conceptual Blending Theory to expound the transfers in synaesthesia,but few of them combine these two theories.In this thesis,the CMT and CBT are allied to illustrate synaesthesia.Li Qingzhao is a famous poetess in Chinese history whose Ci poems1 have great influences in Chinese literature.Over one half of her Ci poems applied synaesthetic metaphors.The application of synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems is more frequent compared with other poets’ poems.Therefore,we seek to show how the meaning of synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems is constructed and formed in terms of a cognitive approach.Description and explanation are adopted here to analyze the synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems.On this basis,the current research devotes to making a thorough investigation on the meaning construction of synaesthetic metaphors and emotions in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems.This paper aims to answer the following questions:(1)What categories of synaesthetic metaphors can be found in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems?(2)What are the characteristics of synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems?(3)How are the meanings of synaesthetic metaphors constructed in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems? The major findings are as follows:First,there are 26 Ci poems of Li Qingzhao applied synaesthetic metaphors.Those synesthetic metaphors can be divided into 13 categories.Among them,11 categories belong to upward transfer and 2 categories belong to downward transfer.This result accords with the hierarchical distribution of synaesthesia proposed by Ullmann.Second,when emotion is taken as another sense modality,vision and touch are the top two predominant source domains in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems.This result is the same as Ullmann’s research.What is different is that vision as the predominant target domain ranks higher than hearing in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems,but hearing is the highest rank which is higher than vision in Ullmann’s research.Third,by combining the CMT and CBT,we find that the elements in Input1 are partially projected onto the blended space,but the elements in Input2 are all projected onto the blended space.Through composition,completion and elaboration,the emergent structure is formed in the blended space,then the process of meaning construction of synaesthetic metaphors is shown to the reader.Besides,the main emotion in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems is sorrow.Cognitive linguistics serves a good way for us to perceive and conceive the world.The present study from the perspective of cognitive linguistics provides us a new way to probe into the meaning construction of synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems,which avoids merely taking synaesthesia as a figure of speech of rhetoric and aesthetics in a traditional way.This thesis can help us to know that how the meaning of synaesthetic metaphors in Li Qingzhao’s Ci poems is constructed and how the author’s mind and body interact with each other in the environment.Besides,it can shed some light on studying Chinese literary works from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Finally,it gives some hint on dealing with the issue of synaesthetic transfer’s distinctions between Chinese and English poems.