Linguistic synaesthesia, metaphor and cognition : the systematicity and significance of linguistic synaesthesia in Chinese

Abstract

This paper proposes a corpus-based approach to synaesthesia in Chinese and demonstrates its significant linguistic values by taking into consideration Chinese characteristics. It is shown that: (1)Chinese synaesthesia can be used in both poetic and daily languages as a diachronic mechanism of semantic change and a synchronic structure realized at multiple levels; (2) It challenges the universal synaesthetic mapping model by providing evidence that linguistic synaesthesia is a kind of metaphor constrained by cognitive mechanisms; (3) Linguistic synaesthesia has a high inter-disciplinary research value, especially for the embodiment in cognitive science and neurological synaesthesia in brain science. 本文旨在结合汉语的特点,提出一种基于语料库的实证性研究方法,用于对汉语通感的系统性考察,并且论证汉语通感重要的语言学研究价值。本文发现:1)通感在汉语中具有系统性的表现,既在文学化的语言中使用,又在日常语言中普遍存在,既是一种历时的词义演变机制,又是一种存在于汉语多个层面的共时语言结构;2)在语言学理论方面,汉语通感对通感具有跨语言普遍映射模型这一假设提出了挑战,而为通感属于隐喻的子类,受制于普遍认知规律这一假设提供了新的证据;3)通感可以为认知领域中身体体验性理论和脑科学领域中联觉现象的研究提供借鉴,因而在跨学科研究视角下同样具有重要的价值。