Synesthetic Metaphor: Perception, Cognition, and Language

Since the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the1980s, metaphor has been regarded as one of thefundamental areas of language and cognition.Nevertheless, few empirical studies have focused onsynesthetic metaphors, which involve transfer fromone sensory domain to another. This study provides atheoretical and empirical analysis of synestheticmetaphors for sound such as bright sound and sharpvoice. Corpus analysis of literary works shows thatsynesthetic metaphors are similar in English andJapanese. However, some differences exist in thetypes of linguistic expressions that accompany themetaphors (e.g., onomatopoeia) and the aspects ofsounds that are described (e.g., sound source). Basedon the experimental data involving three differenttypes of sounds - environmental sounds, music, andspeech - it becomes evident that synestheticmetaphors are related to the physical aspects ofstimuli as well as cultural tendencies. The studybrings together research findings on metaphor andsound from wide-ranging fields, and should be usefulto metaphor researchers in linguistics, philosophy,literature, music theory, anthropology, psychology,and neuroscience.