Auditory synaesthesia and near synonyms: A corpus-based analysis of sheng1 and yin1 in Mandarin Chinese

Qingqing Zhao, Chu-ren Huang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of linguistic synaesthesia in the auditory domain through a corpus-based lexical semantic study of near synonyms. It has been established that the near synonyms sheng "sound" and yin "sound" in Mandarin Chinese have different semantic functions in representing auditory production and auditory perception respectively. Thus, our study is devoted to testing whether linguistic synaesthesia is sensitive to this semantic dichotomy of cognition in particular, and to examining the relationship between linguistic synaesthesia and cognitive modelling in general. Based on the corpus, we find that the near synonyms exhibit both similarities and differences on synaesthesia. The similarities lie in that both and productive recipients of synaesthetic transfers, and vision acts as the source domain most frequently. Besides, the differences exist in selective constraints for and with synaesthetic modifiers as well as syntactic functions of the whole combinations. We propose that the similarities can be explained by the cognitive characteristics of the sound, while the differences are determined by the influence of the semantic dichotomy of production/perception on synaesthesia. Therefore, linguistic synaesthesia is not a random association, but can be motivated and predicted by cognition.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015
PublisherShanghai Jiao Tong University
Pages315-322
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015
Event29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 - Shanghai, China
Duration: 30 Oct 20151 Nov 2015

Conference

Conference29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period30/10/151/11/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Linguistics and Language

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