Construction of Sensory Transfer Model of Gustatory and Olfactory-Synaesthetic Metaphor (GO-STM) and English-Chinese Comparative Study

Hong Duan, Li Gao

College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Department of Foreign Languages, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China.

DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2014.42023                

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the synaesthetic truth of taste and smell in particular. Based on the corpus of gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic cases, classification and statistical tasks are undertaken, in which four main characters are discovered: 1) the particular sorts of gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic metaphors; 2) the bi-directional transfer in specific pairs; 3) the hierarchical distribution among sensory modes; 4) the transfer frequencies of sensory transfer tendencies. Thus, GO-STM of both English and Chinese is constructed. What’s more, the comparison of English and Chinese has been conducted for the first time. According to the statistic results, the percentage of English-Chinese gustatory and olfactory-synaesthetic dead metaphors is 48.1% and 48.3% respectively, and that’s why we always ignore them. Furthermore, the embodiment basis of synaesthetic metaphors is analyzed in light of recent neurological research and Cognitive Linguistics.

Keywords

Synaesthesia, Gustatory and Olfactory Word, Sensory Transfer Model (STM), Gustatory and Olfactory Sensory Transfer Model (GO-STM)

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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