"Warm Colors,Cool Words":Synesthetic Pattern of English Thalpotic Words and Their Cognitive Mechanisms
Thalposis,a kind of tactile sense,is the most basic human experience and its synesthetic pattern is an important issue in metaphor research.Based on Embodied Cognitive Linguistics,this study has explored the synesthetic patterns of English thalpotic words and their cognitive mechanisms by statistically analyzing the frequencies and mapping directions in eight basic and ordinary tactile adjectives("cold/hot/cool/warm"&"fiery/burning/chilly/icy")within the British National Corpus.It is found that both basic and ordinary thalpotic words could map the sense of touch to sight,hearing,taste and smell,and the overall synesthesia ranking from high to low is vision>hearing>taste>smell.Moreover,the proportions of basic thalpotic words mapping to taste and smell is small,and ordinary thalpotic words have almost no synesthetic expression in the olfactory domain.The results suggest that synesthesia is the basis for human to experience the world and its mapping model and mechanism fit the framework of"reality-cognition-language":synesthesia interacts with reality and cognition through image schema,generating synesthetic expression through cognitive mapping.However,under the influence of lexical coding intensity and physiological characteristics,specific lexical synesthetic patterns vary.
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