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.
