The Metaphor and Metonymy of Intersensory Similarities

In linguistics, synesthetic metaphor is a metaphor that exploits a similarity between experiences in different perceptual modalities (Heyrman, 2005). Both of the domains being linked together are required to involve perception; otherwise, the metaphor would be considered as only weakly synesthetic (Werning et al., 2006). Day (1996) also noted that, compared with synesthesia phenomena in psychology, synesthetic metaphors are much like other metaphors with cultural elements incorporated into the semantic processes, rather than being simply innate and hard-wired for human cognition. Further, Marks (1974) suggested that the intersection of synesthetic phenomena between pitch, loudness, brightness, and size is rooted in the fundamental similarities of physical experiences. Thus, from multimodal and perceptual metaphor to synesthetic metaphor, through metaphoric descriptors, perceptual similarities, and crossmodal equivalences, the abstract knowledge of human perceptual embodiment shown in language becomes more intelligible (Cytowic & Cole, 2003; Marks, 1978, 2014).

As formerly noted, perceptual metaphor reflects how people decode, assess, formulate, and remember figures of thought when perceiving senses in terms of language. In general, perceptual metaphors involve the concepts of perception (from the senses of sight, hearing,

touch, smell, or taste) as the target concepts, and an asymmetrical relation of metaphoric expression mediates the inclusion of other types of perception in this perceptual stimulus.

Thus, the source domain may not be semantically more concrete than the target domain, but is perceptually more comprehensible and representational of human experiences. Synesthetic metaphors, in this way, are a typical kind of perceptual metaphor with crossmodal

equivalence in both domains (Marks, 1978, 2014).

However, the identification and classification of synesthetic metaphors still remain uncertain and vague. Synesthetic metaphors are thus usually regarded as having fuzzy boundaries, especially when applied in the discussion of cognitive poetics. The complicity of human figurative speech may be a crucial reason, for literary synesthesia “is the exploitation of verbal synesthesia for specific literary effects.” Compared with the original concept of synesthesia in science, literary synesthesia “is typically concerned with verbal constructs and not with ‘dual perceptions’” (Tsur, 2008).

Firstly, the vagueness of identification is evident in Yu (2003)’s work, which highlighted the similar and different regulations of synesthetic metaphors in different languages (English versus Chinese). Though previous researches have reached a consensus about the presence of synesthetic metaphors in both poetic and everyday language, Yu’s studies of Chinese focused only on the synesthetic metaphors found in literature, mainly novels and poetry.

Daily or non-literary discourse in Chinese did not appear to feature synesthetic metaphors.

Therefore, the conclusion that Yu’s findings are cross-cultural and reflect the general mechanisms between language and embodiment may be ad hoc. Next, compared to the identification of ACIDITY IS LIGHT as a synesthetic metaphor by Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson (2013), Yu’s identification of synesthetic metaphors involved associative connections more

than it did synesthetic mappings. For instance, in his example cited from the story “Dry River”

by Mo Yan, “The shadows of the crows and magpies skimming over were brushing his face like fine feathers,” which appeals to the sense of sight, the “shadows” of the birds flying over are depicted as “brushing” the person’s face, thereby evoking the sense of touch. This depiction emphasizes the different viewpoints or subjectivity of the audience. In other words, because the audience associates the motion of being brushed by fine feathers with softness and tactility, the audience’s sense of touch is evoked. In this way, the audience stands in the character’s shoes and experiences the feeling of being brushed. If an outsider’s view is considered, namely, by focusing on the appearance of moving fine feathers, the similarity in the shapes between flying birds and moving fine feathers may be foregrounded. As mentioned by Marks (2014), most synesthetic phenomena in language may simply be expressions creatively applying nonsynesthetic analogy rather than synesthetic metaphors.

According to Marks (1996), flavor is usually expressed through catachresis. The words that we express usually represent the objects that produce them metonymically. Compared to metaphor, metonymy is based on the relation of congruity rather than similarity, and the mapping between the source and target domains is within one ontological domain (Kövecses, 2010). Formed in extensions that cannot be classified like metaphors, metonymy relies on an actual and literal association between two components within a single domain. Geeraerts (2010) argued that Conceptual Metonymy indicates a referential likelihood between senses.

Moreover, Kövecses (2010) explained the types of metonymy emerging from the relations of the inter-components of the ICM (Lakoff, 1987a), for example, whole-part metonymy and part-part metonymy.

In studying the synesthetic metonymies expressed by wine critics, Paradis and

Eeg-Olofsson (2013) defined synesthetic metonymization to mean the “foregrounded” perceptual property of an object or event as a metonymy of shifting active zones. Along with Kövecses (2010), who proposed the notion of whole-and-part metonymy, Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson (2013) showed that the WHOLE-PART account is the main approach in the metonymic expression of sensory experiences.

Some cognitive linguists have viewed the components or features as the salient parts of
word representation, and the remaining contextual parts as the background (Cruse, 2000;

Langacker, 1987). According
to Gestalt psychology, this phenomenon consists of separate degrees of foregrounding and backgrounding, and is named the figure-ground effect (Langacker, 1984, 1987, 1990). Langacker (1990) also asserted that the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is inseparable. Echoing the effect, he determined this metonymic relationship in terms of profile and base. Every word representation is shaped in a certain domain, which contains a concept (profile) highlighting the region or aspect of the domain, and renders the base to be less salient.

Nevertheless, whereas conceptual metaphors seem to have a certain semantic structure of components, the perceptual components of synesthetic metaphors appear to be semantically primitive and non-compositional (Löbner, 2002). The reason lies in the high productivity of the expressions featuring synesthetic metaphors, which requires the construal to be semantically marginally structured. Therefore, in terms of how the comprehension and explanation of synesthetic metaphors and metonymies are generated from human minds, the answers from the previous studies still remain obscure.