Synaesthesia in Chinese: A corpus-based study on gustatory adjectives in Mandarin

This study adopted a corpus-based approach to examine the synaesthetic metaphors of gustatory adjectives in Mandarin. Based on the distribution of synaesthetic uses in the corpus, we found that: (1) the synaesthetic metaphors of Mandarin gustatory adjectives exhibited directionality; (2) the directionality of Mandarin synaesthetic gustatory adjectives showed both commonality and specificity when compared with the attested directionality of gustatory adjectives in English, which calls for a closer re-examination of the claim of cross-lingual universality of synaesthetic tendencies; and (3) the distribution and directionality of Mandarin synaesthetic gustatory adjectives could not be predicted by a single hypothesis, such as the embodiment-driven approach or the biological association-driven approach. Thus, linguistic synaesthesia was constrained by both the embodiment principle and the biological association mechanism

Mandarin Chinese modality exclusivity norms

Modality exclusivity norms have been developed in different languages for research on the relationship between perceptual and conceptual systems. This paper sets up the first modality exclusivity norms for Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language with semantics as its orthographically relevant level. The norms are collected through two studies based on Chinese sensory words. The experimental designs take into consideration the morpho-lexical and orthographic structures of Chinese. Study 1 provides a set of norms for Mandarin Chinese single-morpheme words in mean ratings of the extent to which a word is experienced through the five sense modalities. The degrees of modality exclusivity are also provided. The collected norms are further analyzed to examine how sub-lexical orthographic representations of sense modalities in Chinese characters affect speakers’ interpretation of the sensory words. In particular, we found higher modality exclusivity rating for the sense modality explicitly represented by a semantic radical component, as well as higher auditory dominant modality rating for characters with transparent phonetic symbol components. Study 2 presents the mean ratings and modality exclusivity of coordinate disyllabic compounds involving multiple sense modalities. These studies open new perspectives in the study of modality exclusivity. First, links between modality exclusivity and writing systems have been established which has strengthened previous accounts of the influence of orthography in the processing of visual information in reading. Second, a new set of modality exclusivity norms of compounds is proposed to show the competition of influence on modality exclusivity from different linguistic factors and potentially allow such norms to be linked to studies on synesthesia and semantic transparency

Metaphor and Senses

The book deals with the synesthetic metaphors in Synamet – a semantically and grammatically annotated corpus. The texts included in the corpus are excerpted from blogs devoted to, among others, perfume, wine, beer, music, art, massage and wellness. The thesis presents a Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and frame-based analysis of synesthetic metaphors in Polish. Using data from the corpus, the book provides ample empirical support for embodiment in metaphor and internal logic of mappings between frames. The study proposes new models of verbal synesthesia in the corpus and calls into question a universality of hierarchy of senses. This book should be of interest to researchers working within cognitive linguistics, in particular metaphor theory, frame semantics, corpus linguistics, and sensory science

Chinese Synesthesia Detection: New Dataset and Models

In this paper, we introduce a new task called synesthesia detection, which aims to extract the sensory word of a sentence, and to predict the original and synesthetic sensory modalities of the corresponding sensory word. Synesthesia refers to the description of perceptions in one sensory modality through concepts from other modalities. It involves not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought and action, which makes it become a bridge between figurative linguistic phenomenon and abstract cognition, and thus be helpful to understand the deep semantics. To address this, we construct a large-scale human-annotated Chinese synesthesia dataset, which contains 7,217 annotated sentences accompanied by 187 sensory words. Based on this dataset, we propose a family of strong and representative baseline models. Upon these baselines, we further propose a radical-based neural network model to identify the boundary of the sensory word, and to jointly detect the original and synesthetic sensory modalities for the word. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the importance of the proposed task and dataset can be verified by the statistics and progressive performances. In addition, our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on the synesthesia dataset

"All my sour-sweet days I will lament and love" – a comparative analysis of metaphors with the basic taste adjectives in Polish and English

All my sour-sweet days I will lament and love – a comparative analysis of metaphors with the basic taste adjectives in Polish and English This paper provides a comparative analysis of verbal synesthetic metaphors with the basic taste adjectives in Polish and English: słodki/sweet, gorzki/bitter, kwaśny/sour, słony/salty. Since taste seems to be an ideal candidate for a universal, biologically determined source of metaphors, the authors seek to verify the hypothesis of metaphor embodiment. The corpus-based analysis of nominal phrases with basic Polish and English taste adjectives indicates that cultural influences on the metaphorical mapping, as well as the importance of the target conceptual domains, must be taken into account.   All my sour-swet days I will lament and love – kontrastywna analiza metafor z przymiotnikami oznaczającymi podstawowe smaki w języku polskim i angielskim W artykule analizowane są metafory synestezyjne z przymiotnikami określającymi podstawowe smaki w języku polskim i angielskim: słodki/sweet, gorzki/bitter, kwaśny/sour, słony/salty. Percepcja smakowa, uwarunkowana biologicznie, wydaje się dobrym przykładem uniwersalnej domeny źródłowej w procesie metaforyzacji. Celem pracy jest weryfikacja kognitywnej teorii o metaforze ucieleśnionej oraz sprawdzenie, w jakim stopniu na proces metaforyzacji wpływają czynniki kulturowe

Übereinzelsprachliche Tendenzen bei synästhetischen Metaphern

Bei synästhetischen Metaphern werden Wörter aus einer Sinnesdomäne zur Beschreibung eines anderen Wahrnehmungsbereichs verwendet. Entsprechend „kann eine Stimme weich (Tastsinn), warm (Wärmeempfindung), scharf (Geschmack) oder dunkel (Sehen) sein“ (BUSSMANN 2002: 671). Neben der Klassifizierung von synästhetischen Metaphern besteht ein weiteres Ziel dieser Arbeit darin, deren übereinzelsprachliche Tendenzen herauszuarbeiten und zu systematisieren. Hierbei zeigen sich vor allem Parallelen hinsichtlich der Übergänge sprachlicher Synästhesien. Auf Basis der Analyse verschiedener Quellen (einzelsprachliche Arbeiten, Wörterbucheinträge etc.) werden typische Übergänge extrahiert und in einem synthetischen Modell zusammengefasst. Zudem werden mögliche Erklärungsansätze für die parallelen Erscheinungsformen diskutiert. Diese umfassen sowohl biologische als auch sprachwissenschaftliche Argumentationen

The Cognitive Polysemy of Sensory Terms in Sanskrit

Colour is not a universal concept, and each linguistic culture carves up the world of visual experience in very particular and contingent ways. Further, the colour words of every language each possess a unique and dynamic assemblage of figurative meanings. Studies in the semantics of colour terms have usually been limited by assuming the universality of colour categories derived from European languages, and the attendant notion of Basic Colour Terms (BCTs). Mapping the semantics of colour terms are complicated, particularly if one is working with a historical language such as Sanskrit, which has a massive textual corpus that is not yet amenable to systematic lexical searches. Hence it is a challenge to adduce sufficient attestations from the literature. Besides fixing the meaning in individual attestations, one also needs to trace diachronic and metaphorical shifts in meaning, as the case may be. There is a close and meaningful overlap between visual terms and metaphor for the student of semantics, and this is all-important for studying the cross-sensory and cross-modal expansions in a terms semantic space. This thesis addresses the need to look beyond BCTs and non-BCTs, and offers a model for producing a historical thesaurus of the colour lexis in Sanskrit, using as sources kāvya (belletristic literature), alaṅkāraśāstra (poetics) and the koṣa-s (traditional lexicons). The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the model of lakṣanā given by the Sanskrit poetologist Mammaṭabhaṭṭa (~11th century CE) are examined, vis-à-vis their suitability to study linguistic metaphor. Detailed and diachronic semantic maps of raga and aruṇa are presented to examine the tendency of these terms to engage with figurative meaning. The evidence suggests the figurative use of colour terms is motivated by metonym and metaphor, and specific instances of semantic narrowing may be motivated by the expansion of the colour vocabulary