Auditory Synaesthesia and Near Synonyms: A Corpus-Based Analysis of sheng1 and yin1 in Mandarin Chinese

Auditory Synaesthesia and Near Synonyms: A Corpus-Based Analysis of sheng1 and yin1 in Mandarin Chinese Qingqing Zhao1 Chu-Ren Huang2 The Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 1zhaoqingqing0611@163.com 2churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk 3hongz.xu@gmail.com Hongzhi Xu3 Abstract This paper explores the nature of linguistic synaesthesia in the auditory domain through a corpus-based lexical semantic study of near synonyms. It has been established that the near synonyms 聲 sheng “sound” and 音 yin “sound” in Mandarin Chinese have different semantic functions in representing auditory production and auditory perception respec- tively. Thus, our study is devoted to test- ing whether linguistic synaesthesia is sensi- tive to this semantic dichotomy of cognition in particular, and to examining the relation- ship between linguistic synaesthesia and cog- nitive modelling in general. Based on the cor- pus, we find that the near synonyms exhibit both similarities and differences on synaesthe- sia. The similarities lie in that both 聲 and 音 are productive recipients of synaesthetic trans- fers, and vision acts as the source domain most frequently. Besides, the differences exist in se- lective constraints for 聲 and 音 with synaes- thetic modifiers as well as syntactic functions of the whole combinations. We propose that the similarities can be explained by the cogni- tive characteristics of the sound, while the dif- ferences are determined by the influence of the semantic dichotomy of production/perception on synaesthesia. Therefore, linguistic synaes- thesia is not a random association, but can be motivated and predicted by cognition. 1 Introduction Synaesthesia is a phenomenon of one sensation connecting to another, which has been studied in two distinct disciplines. One is neuroscience, which characterizes synaesthesia as a neural disor- der (Cytowic, 1993), and the other one is linguis- tics that widely describes synaesthesia as a metaphor (Williams, 1976; Geeraerts, 2010). This paper is fo- cused on the linguistic synaesthesia. Synaesthesia occurs commonly and naturally in languages (Huang, 2015), such as “sweet voice” in English and 高音 gao-yin “high pitch” in Chinese, of which “sweet” and 高 gao “high” are normally perceived through gustation and vision respectively, while “voice” and 音 yin “sound” both belong to the auditory domain, therefore, the whole combina- tions exhibit an association of different sensations, namely synaesthesia. In terms of research on linguistic synaesthesia, most previous studies are concentrated on the direc- tionality of synaesthetic transfers, that is, which sen- sation usually acts as the source domain and which sensation is the target domain. For instance, Ull- mann (1957) studied creative usages of synaesthesia on 2000 examples from poems in the 19th century, and proposed a tendency of hierarchical distribution for synaesthesia. He concluded that synaesthetic transfers are usually from much “lower domains” (such as touch and taste) to much “higher domains” (such as vision and hearing)1, and the acoustic field emerges as the main recipient. Williams (1976) also claimed that the diachronic meaning change of synaesthetic adjectives in ordinary English obeys a strict rule that can be universal for all human lan- guages, as shown in Figure1. 1The terms, …

Content truncated to 500 words