A Corpus-Based study on synaesthetic adjectives in modern Chinese

Abstract

This paper focuses on 15 sensory adjectives from the gustatory sense, the tactile sense and the olfactory sense in Modern Chinese, and summarizes their synaesthetic distributions. Based on the corpus, we find some tendency among synaesthetic transfers of these 15 adjectives. The first important finding is related to the directionality of synaesthetic transfers, that is, the transfer direction is mostly from the gustatory sense to both tactile and olfactory senses, and from the tactile sense to the olfactory sense, while the reverse direction is rare. Another interesting tendency is the priority of synaesthesia over the embodied metaphor. Our data shows that sensory adjectives that have synaesthetic distributions tend to also have distributions in embodied metaphors, but not vice versa.