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Synaesthesia in Chinese: A corpus-based study on gustatory adjectives in Mandarin
Zhao, Q., Huang, C. R., & Long, Y. (2018). Synaesthesia in Chinese: A corpus-based study on gustatory adjectives in Mandarin. Linguistics, 56(5), 1167-1194. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0019
Abstract
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.
