A brief discussion of synesthesia and metaphor

             Synesthesia rhetoric, commonly known as shift feel, is when people describe objects, divert and interlace human’s the sense of auditory, visual, smell, taste and tactile, make the construct more vivacious and branch new. It is also a kind of metaphor, and all kinds of human sense are unbounded. In a synesthesia sentence or clause, color seems have temperature, sound seems have images, and warmth and coldness seems have weight. According to Lackoff ,  metaphors are not merely decorative features of certain styles, but an essential component of human cognition. Synesthesia philosophical basis is the common regulation of nature, things around the world do not exist in isolation, they are inextricably linked by each other.

           Chinese has synesthesia both in spoken and written systems. Such as same speeches in Chinese:

—Synethesia between the sense of visual and smell:

—淡紫色的香味  tan⁵¹ tsi:²¹⁴ sɯ:ə⁵¹ tə²¹ ɕiaŋ⁵⁵ wei⁵¹    กลิ่นหอมสีม่วง

—Synethesia between the sense of visual and taste:

—脸都苦了    liən²¹⁴ tou³³ k^hu:²¹⁴ lə²¹    หน้าขมหมดแล้ว

—Synethesia between the sense of auditory and taste:

—她的声音真甜   t^ha:³³tə²¹ʂəŋ³³jin³³ʐən³³t^hiən²⁵ เสียงเขาหวานจริง ect.

            In Chinese the most famous synethesia sentence is from < the lotus pool by moonlight> of Zhu Ziqing, the writer masterly used synethesia to create a beautiful mood.

“The breeze carried past gusts of fragrance, like the strains of a song faintly heard from a far-off tower.”

According to source domain and target domain we can analysis this metaphor: fragrance of the breeze is the source domain and strains of a song is the target domain, the similarity between these two domains is that both of them have wonderful nature, can make people feel fresh and pleasant, and have a feeling like slim blurred, as if smell the aroma and listen the song.

Auditory sense	Visual sense
source: strains of a song	target: gusts of fragrance
Nice and blurred song	The fragrancy of the wind
Carried by : air	Breeze
Distance: from a far-off tower	Where the breeze pass

       Synethesia is a common kind of metaphor, if the frequency is often enough then it is possible that synethesia can cause semantic change. Take Chinese for example, “闻 wən²⁵” the original meaning is “listening”, is the sense of auditory, as time went by, the meaning expanded , it had the meaning “ to smell”, and even more the later meaning became the main meaning of“闻 wən²⁵  ”.