現代漢語和古漢語的通感隱喩映射方向性綜合硏究

Abstract

Synaesthesia is a physical phenomenon which refers to ‘the involuntary experience of a cross-modal association’ (Shen 2008). In linguistics, generally speaking, synaesthesia is considered as a common sort of metaphor in poetic and ordinary language which can make a metaphoric transfer from one sensory domain to another. For instance, ‘cold color’ is linguistically synaesthetic, because the speaker expresses a perception of vision by using a word related to touch. In this paper, I make a brief introduction to linguistic synaesthesia, namely, synaesthetic metaphor, based on previous studies in different languages and different methods, and then, attempt to analyze the synaesthetic data collected from modern and ancient Chinese. In conclusion, the data analysis results of both modern Mandarin Chinese and ancient Chinese show that the linguistic synaesthesia from Chinese is different from that from Ullmann’s (1957) study in the metaphoric directionality. It implies that linguistic synaesthesia could have language- or culture-specific variations as per language.