A Study of Chinese Sensation Verbs Used in Linguistic Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a well-known phenomenon, both as a neural disorder (The Man Who Tasted Shapes) and a device for linguistic metaphors. The neural basis of synaesthesia is characterized by sensation stimuli or cognition that induces a different cognition spontaneously and involuntarily. Sensation verbs are rich and varied in the Chinese lexicon, but so far there has been no extensive study concerning their use in linguistic synaesthesia. To address this gap in the literature, this study will investigate linguistic synaesthesia using the visual verbs “kan4 (look)” and “jian4 (look)”. Moreover, a discussion on semantic mappings and metaphors will be presented.