In the existing literature on synaesthetic metaphors in poetry it is proposed that transfers tend to go from the ‘lower’ (touch, smell, taste) to the ‘higher’ (sight, hearing) sensory modalities. The purpose of this article is to establish if the same directionality also holds for synaesthetic associations found in other text types. To this end, a method for the semi-automatic extraction of synaesthesia is introduced and applied to general-purpose corpora of English (ukWaC) and Italian (itWaC). In the data collected for these languages, most transfers proceed in the expected direction, e.g. sweet voice, but instances of ‘backward’ transfers are also found, e.g. bitter cold. Based on these results, it is claimed that the ‘directionality principle’ reflects the frequency of association types, rather than representing universal constraints on synaesthetic transfers, as has often been more or less explicitly assumed. It is here argued that both properties of human perception and more strictly linguistic factors can account for the frequency tendencies observed in synaesthesia. The proposed interpretation is also shown to account for apparently contradictory evidence coming from typological studies on verbs of perception.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.
Baroni, Marco, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi & Eros Zanchetta. 2009. The WaCky wide web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation 43(3). 209–226.
Caballero, Rosario & Ernesto Suárez-Toste. 2006. Acidity is light. Sight metaphors in wine assessment. Actas del XXIV Congreso Internacional de AESLA, 1541–1546. Madrid: UNED.
Cacciari, Cristina. 2008. Crossing the senses in metaphorical language. In Raymond W. Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 425–443. New York, NY: CUP.
Calvert, Gemma, Charles Spence & Barry E. Stein (eds.). 2004. The handbook of multisensory processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Canobbio, Andrea Tullio. 2004. Trattamento delle sensazioni nella poesia di Guido Gozzano. Genova: University of Genova MA thesis.
Catricalà, Maria. 2012. Sinestesie, monoestesie e linguistica: Temi e problemi. In Maria Catricalà (ed.), 19–51.
Catricalà, Maria (ed.). 2012. Sinestesie e monoestesie: Prospettive a confronto. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Cheng, Winnie. 2012. Exploring corpus linguistics: Language in action. New York/London: Routledge.
Downey, June E. 1912. Literary synesthesia. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9(18). 490–498.
Evans, Nicholas & David Wilkins. 2000. In the mind’s ear: The semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language 76(3). 546–592.
Ferraresi, Adriano, Eros Zanchetta, Marco Baroni & Silvia Bernardini. 2008. Introducing and evaluating ukWaC, a very large web-derived corpus of English. In Proceedings of the WAC4 Workshop at LREC 2008. <[URL].
Howes, David. 2003. Sensual relations. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Kandel, Eric, James Schwartz, Thomas Jessell, Steven Siegelbaum & James Hudspeth. 2012. Principles of neural science. 5th edn. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Le Breton, David. 2006. La Saveur du monde: Une anthropologie des sens. Paris: Éditions Métailié.
Lehrer, Adrienne. 1978. Structures of the lexicon and transfers of meaning. Lingua 451. 95–123.
Marks, Lawrence E. 1996. On perceptual metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 1(1). 36–96.
Marotta, Giovanna. 2012. Sinestesie tra vista, udito e dintorni: Un’analisi semantica distribuzionale. In Maria Catricalà (ed.), 19–51.
Maslova, Elena. 2004. A universal constraint on the sensory lexicon, or when hear can mean ‘see’? In Aleksandr P. Volodin (ed.), Tipologičeskie obosnovanija v grammatike: k 70-letiju professora Xrakovskogo V.S, 300–312. Moscow: Znak.
Müller, Simone. 2006. Synästhetische Ausdrucksformen in der klassischen japanischen Poesie der Shinkokin-Zeit. In Simone Müller (ed.), Synästhesie und Metaphorik (MOAG 144), 37–59. Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens.
O’Malley, Glenn. 1957. Literary synesthesia. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15(4). 391–411.
Paissa, Paola. 1995. La Sinestesia. Storia e analisi del concetto. Brescia: La Scuola.
Palmer, Frank R. 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: CUP.
Paradis, Carita. Forthcoming. Conceptual spaces at work in sensory cognition: Domains, dimensions and distances. In Peter Gärdenfors & Frank Zenker (eds.), Applications of conceptual spaces. The case for geometric knowledge representation. Dordrecht: Springer.
Paradis, Carita & Mats Eeg-Olofsson. 2013. Describing sensory experience: The genre of wine reviews. Metaphor and Symbol 28(1). 22–40.
Popova, Yanna. 2003. ‘The fool sees with his nose’: Metaphoric mappings in the sense of smell in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. Language and Literature 12(2). 135–151.
Rosiello, Luigi. 1963. Le sinestesie nell’opera poetica di Montale. Rendiconti 71. 1–19.
Shen, Yeshayahu & Michal Cohen. 1998. How come silence is sweet but sweetness is not silent: A cognitive account of directionality in poetic synaesthesia. Language and Literature 7(2). 123–140.
Shen, Yeshayahu & Ravid Aisenman. 2008. ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’: Synaesthesia and cognition. Language and Literature 17(2). 101–121.
Simner, Julia & Edward M Hubbard (eds.). 2013. Oxford handbook of synesthesia. Oxford: OUP.
Spence, Charles, Cesare Parise & Yi-Chuan Chen. 2012. The Colavita visual dominance effect. In Micah M. Murray & Mark T. Wallace (eds.), The neural bases of multisensory processes, 529–556. Boca Raton (FL): CRC Press.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries (eds.). 2006. Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Strik Lievers, Francesca, Xu Hongzhi & Xu Ge. 2013. A methodology for the extraction of lexicalized synaesthesia from corpora. Paper presented at ICL19 (International Congress of Linguists). Geneva, Switzerland, 21-27/7/2013.
Tornitore, Tonino. 2012. Sinestesie del terzo tipo: Proposta minimale di definizione e classificazione. In Maria Catricalà (ed.), 171–180.
Tsur, Reuven. 2007. Issues in literary synaesthesia. Style 411. 30–52.
Ullmann, Stephen. 1957. The principles of semantics. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Viberg, Åke. 1984. The verbs of perception: A typological study. Linguistics 21(1). 123–162.
Viberg, Åke. 2001. Verbs of perception. In Martin Haspelmath, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook. Vol. II1. 1294–1309. Berlin: Mouton.
Whitt, Richard J. 2010. Evidentiality and perception verbs in English and German. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Yu, Ning. 2003. Synaesthetic metaphor: A cognitive perspective. Journal of Literary Semantics 321. 19–34.
Cited by (43)
Cited by 43 other publications
Chen, Joanna Zhuoan, Kathleen Ahrens & Dennis Tay
2024. ‘Luxurious’ metaphors in luxury hotel websites in Singapore and Hong Kong: A mixed-methods study. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4:2 ► pp. 100090 ff.
2024. A Study of Adding Psychological Feeling into the Model of Synaesthesia at the Morpheme Level in Modern Chinese. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14514], ► pp. 400 ff.
Zhong, Yin, Kathleen Ahrens & Chu-Ren Huang
2024. Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 245 ff.
2022. The picture looks like my music sounds: directional preferences in synesthetic metaphors in the absence of lexical factors. Language and Cognition 14:2 ► pp. 208 ff.
Jo, Charmhun
2022. Linguistic Synesthesia in Korean: Universality and Variation. SAGE Open 12:3 ► pp. 215824402211178 ff.
Winter, Bodo & Mahesh Srinivasan
2022. Why is Semantic Change Asymmetric? The Role of Concreteness and Word Frequency and Metaphor and Metonymy. Metaphor and Symbol 37:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Winter, Bodo, Márton Sóskuthy, Marcus Perlman & Mark Dingemanse
2022. Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages. Scientific Reports 12:1
Zawisławska, Magdalena
2022. Frame-Based Annotation in the Corpus of Synesthetic Metaphors. In Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13212], ► pp. 289 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing, Kathleen Ahrens & Chu-Ren Huang
2022. Linguistic synesthesia is metaphorical: a lexical-conceptual account. Cognitive Linguistics 33:3 ► pp. 553 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing & Yunfei Long
2022. A Diachronic Study on Linguistic Synesthesia in Chinese. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13250], ► pp. 84 ff.
2022. Sensorimotor norms for Chinese nouns and their relationship with orthographic and semantic variables. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 37:8 ► pp. 1000 ff.
ÖZKAN KURT, Fatma
2022. Türkiye Türkçesinde Koku Alanını İfade Etme Biçimleri: Eylemler. Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi 6:4 ► pp. 1416 ff.
BAŞ, Melike
2021. tat- Eyleminin Anlam Genişlemesi Üzerine Bir İnceleme. Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi 5:2 ► pp. 1538 ff.
2020. How language and image construct synaesthetic metaphors in print advertising. Visual Communication 19:4 ► pp. 431 ff.
CABALLERO, ROSARIO & CARITA PARADIS
2020. Soundscapes in English and Spanish: a corpus investigation of verb constructions. Language and Cognition 12:4 ► pp. 705 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing
2020. From Linguistic Synaesthesia to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. In Embodied Conceptualization or Neural Realization [Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 10], ► pp. 115 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing
2020. Methodology: A Corpus-Driven Approach. In Embodied Conceptualization or Neural Realization [Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 10], ► pp. 19 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing
2020. Mandarin Gustatory Adjectives. In Embodied Conceptualization or Neural Realization [Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 10], ► pp. 69 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing
2020. Introduction to Synaesthesia. In Embodied Conceptualization or Neural Realization [Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 10], ► pp. 1 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing, Yunfei Long & Chu-Ren Huang
2020. Linguistic Synaesthesia of Mandarin Sensory Adjectives: Corpus-Based and Experimental Approaches. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11831], ► pp. 139 ff.
2019. Metaphors in Polish wine discourse: A corpus approach. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 55:3 ► pp. 601 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing, Chu-Ren Huang & Kathleen Ahrens
2019. Directionality of linguistic synesthesia in Mandarin: A corpus-based study. Lingua 232 ► pp. 102744 ff.
Lupyan, Gary & Bodo Winter
2018. Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren't languages more iconic?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 373:1752 ► pp. 20170137 ff.
Strik Lievers, Francesca & Bodo Winter
2018. Sensory language across lexical categories. Lingua 204 ► pp. 45 ff.
Xiong, Jiajuan & Chu-Ren Huang
2018. Somewhere in COLDNESS Lies Nibbāna: Lexical Manifestations of COLDNESS. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11173], ► pp. 70 ff.
Zhao, Qingqing, Chu-Ren Huang & Yunfei Long
2018. Synaesthesia in Chinese: A corpus-based study on gustatory adjectives in Mandarin. Linguistics 56:5 ► pp. 1167 ff.
2018. Synaesthesia and Other Figures. What the Senses Tell Us About Figurative Language. In Sensory Perceptions in Language, Embodiment and Epistemology [Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 42], ► pp. 193 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.