A lexicon of perception for the identification of synaesthetic metaphors in corpora

A Lexicon of Perception for the Identification of Synaesthetic Metaphors in Corpora Francesca Strik Lievers1, Chu-Ren Huang2 1University of Milano-Bicocca, 2Hong Kong Polytechnic University francesca.striklievers@gmail.com, churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract Synaesthesia is a type of metaphor associating linguistic expressions that refer to two different sensory modalities. Previous studies, based on the analysis of poetic texts, have shown that synaesthetic transfers tend to go from the lower toward the higher senses (e.g., sweet music vs. musical sweetness). In non-literary language synaesthesia is rare, and finding a sufficient number of examples manually would be too time-consuming. In order to verify whether the directionality also holds for conventional synaesthesia found in non-literary texts, an automatic procedure for the identification of instances of synaesthesia is therefore highly desirable. In this paper, we first focus on the preliminary step of this procedure, that is, the creation of a controlled lexicon of perception. Next, we present the results of a small pilot study that applies the extraction procedure to English and Italian corpus data. Keywords: synaesthesia, lexicon, perception 1. Synaesthesia Linguistic synaesthesia is a metaphorical process of transfer from one sensory modality (source) to a different one (target). A perceptual experience related to one sense is described by lexical means usually associated to a different sense. For example, if we describe a melody as sweet, we are characterising a hearing-related perceptual experience (melody) in terms of taste (sweet). Melody is the target and sweet is the source of the transfer. Classic studies of synaesthesia are usually based on literary texts. More specifically, many of them focus on Romantic and Symbolist poetry, where synaesthesia finds its most conspicuous and evident expression. Poetic texts include many examples of living synaesthesia, that is, novel associations of sensory expressions (e.g., sweet light / golden with audible odours exquisite, Arthur Symons, The Opium Smoker, from Ullmann 1957: 275). Interestingly, despite the creativity that characterizes these instances of synaesthesia, several studies (among others, Ullmann, 1957; Shen & Cohen, 1998; Bretones- Callejas, 2001) have shown that synaesthetic transfers tend to be formed following a specific directionality: they have as sources the “lower” senses (touch, smell and taste) and as targets the “higher” senses. For example, melodious sweetness is less likely to occur than sweet melody. In more recent years, it has been suggested that this tendency may have a cognitive or perceptual motivation (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Allen-Hermanson and Matey, 2012). In this study, we focus on non-literary texts. In the majority of cases, synaesthetic phrases that are found in everyday language are instances of conventional synaesthesia, such as warm voices, cold lights, sour smells, etc. (Strik Lievers, 2015b). Data concerning conventional synaesthesia are likely to be more revealing of possible cognitive underpinnings, if compared to living and creative synaesthesia. A large-scale study based on non-literary texts is still missing. Such a study could either confirm or dismiss the directionality generalisation, and its attached cognitive implications, being a privileged window into the perception / language interface. This paper is a first step in this direction: it …

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