A corpus-based study on synesthesia in Korean ordinary language

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 249–254 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Charmhun Jo A corpus-based study on synesthesia in Korean ordinary language Charmhun Jo Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong jch337@hotmail.com Abstract Synesthesia means an involuntary neurologi- cal phenomenon where “sensory events in one modality take on qualities usually considered appropriate to another” (Marks, 1982, p. 15). More generally, it indicates an experiential mapping of one sense domain with another, such as “sweet sound”. The study reported in this paper is to test Ullmann’s (1963) theoreti- cal framework of “hierarchical distribution” through the synesthetic data coming out of Korean National Corpus (KNC), focusing on modern daily Korean. The research questions here are (a) what are the routes for Korean synesthetic transfers like?, (b) what are the predominant source and target domain for the transfers?, and (c) what are the universal and/or culture-specific aspects in the associa- tion? Based on Strik Lievers et al.’s (2013) methodology, the study extracts synesthetic data from KNC. As a result, the data analysis shows that (a) Korean synesthesia conforms to Ullmann’s (1963) general scheme in the met- aphoric mappings, (b) the predominant source domain is touch while the predominant target is hearing, which matches with Ullmann’s (1963) study as well, and (c) there could be a delicate cultural dependency, which means “taste” occupies a significant position together with “touch” in Korean synesthetic metaphors. 1 Introduction Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaes- thesia) has been an interesting research topic in diverse academic fields. The term synesthesia comes from the Ancient Greek σύν syn, “together”, and αἴσθησις aisthēsis, “sensation”. Basically, syn- esthesia refers to an involuntary neurological phe- nomenon where “sensory events in one modality take on qualities usually considered appropriate to another” (Marks, 1982, p. 15). To be more general, it means an experiential association of one sense domain with another, such as “sweet sound” and “cold color”. In linguistics, synesthesia is under- stood in terms of metaphor (Williams, 1976; Geeraerts, 2010), which means that a perceptual experience of one sense is described by lexical ex- pressions associated with another. For example, “sweet sound” is linguistically synesthetic because the speaker expresses a perception of sound (“sound”) using a word related to taste (“sweet”), where “sound” becomes the target domain of the transfer and “sweet” is the source. The synesthetic metaphors were introduced by S. Ullmann (1963), where he proposed his theoretical framework of “hierarchical distribution” as a probable universal principle in the process of synesthetic mapping. In this light, the objective of the study is to test Ullmann’s (1963) theoretical framework using the synesthetic data from Korean National Corpus (KNC). Therefore, the research questions here are (a) what are the routes for Korean synesthetic transfers like?, (b) what are the predominant source and target domain for the transfers?, and (c) what are the universal and/or culture-specific aspects in the association? 2 Brief literature review As the seminal work of synesthetic metaphors, Ullmann …

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