Auditory Synaesthesia and Near Synonyms: A Corpus-Based Analysis of sheng1 and yin1 in Mandarin Chinese

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 聲 sheng “sound” and 音 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聲 and音 are productive recipients of synaesthetic transfers, and vision acts as the source domain most frequently. Besides, the differences exist in selective constraints for聲 and音 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.