PATTERNS OF LEXICAL SYNAESTHESIA IN JAPANESE Deborah Field Department of Linguistics Faculty of Arts Australian National University PATTERNS OF LEXICAL SYNAESTHESIA IN JAPANESE Deborah Field A Sub-thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts (Linguistics) in the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University,Canberra March 1990 DECLARATION This sub-thesis is my own original work. All sources used have been acknoweldged. Deborah Field March 1990 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge my indebtness to my two supervisors, Professor Anna Wierzbicka of the Department of Linguistics and Dr. A.E. Backhouse of the Japan Centre, for their valuable comments and advice on the writing of this sub-thesis. I would also like to thank Professor Tetsuya Kunihiro of the University of Tokyo, Japan for sending me several papers on synaesthesia-related topics. To my informants, Naoki Matsumoto, Itsuko Maddess and Chika Koizumi, I owe thanks for their time and patience in gathering and checking the Japanese data. Thanks must also go to Carmen Pereira for an excellent job of typing such a difficult manuscript. Last, but by no means least, I owe special thanks to the principal informant, my husband, Naoki Matsumoto. Without his constant encouragement and support, this sub-thesis would have truly never been written. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION FORMS OF SYNAESTHESIA: Perceptual Synaesthesia Phonetic Synaesthesia Perceptuolinguistic Synaesthesia Synaesthetic Thought and Verbal Synaesthesia PATTERNS OF LEXICAL SYNAESTHESIA; Williams’ Model Kunihiro's Model CONTEXT OF THE PRESENT STUDY: Aims Outline Chapter 2 * SENSE OF SIGHT 2A DIMENSION 2B COLOUR Chapter 3 SENSE OF HEARING Chapter 4 SENSE OF TOUCH Chapter 5 SENSE OF TASTE Chapter 6 SENSE OF SMELL Chapter 7 CONCLUSION Appendix Bibliography t/ ^ cr>— ^ These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves ; the rose for its scent ; the nightingale for his song ; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless ; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. Alfred North Whitehead, Science•and - th e•Modern - World SAöm CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION FORMS OF SYNAESTHESIA The phenomenon known as Tsynaesthesia' -- "the translation of attributes of sensation from one sensory domain to another" (Marks, 1975:303) .-- is one of the most intriguing products of the human mind, and represents one area of study which extends into a number of academic disciplines, including physiology, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and linguistics. Perhaps the most commonplace of all synaesthetic correspondences is the conjunction of the sense modality of sight (colour) and touch (thermal sensations): Blue and green are often perceived and described as cool colours , red and yellow as warm • ~ Synaesthesia manifests itself in a number of ways: (i) in perceptual processes, from purely perceptual synaestheslas, where the different senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell furnish common information about external reality and where characteristics of sensory experience resemble one another; and (ii) in cognitive processes, where a transitional phase via phonetic symbolism leads to perceptuollngulstlc synaestheslas , where analogies are drawn between perceptions in one sensory modality (usually the sense of sight) and words in language (usually adjectives); and finally, (iii) to the domain 1. Coren, et at. (1979:206) quote a delightful experiment conducted by Boynton (1971) where the results of his experiments have shown that people will turn a heat control to a higher setting in a blue room than they will in a yellow room. (2) of purely verbal synaesthesias , where representations of cross-sensory equivalence emerge in language (i.e. synaesthetic metaphors), describing or suggesting similarities among sensory phenomena (Osgood,1980:205). In short, the various modes of synaesthesia would seem to form a chain-like progression of cross-modal correspondences, from a purely sensory to a sensory- verbal, to the purely verbal realm (Marks,1975:327); and this is highly suggestive of the possibility that synaesthetic verbal expressions are by and large dependent on, at least what would appear to be innate, psychological synaesthesias (Abelin,1988:17). This, of course, further carries the implication that synaesthetic metaphor in language is, in the words of Ullmann, "quite possibly a universal, form of metaphor" (1963:242). Indeed, given the fact that sensory qualities permeate thought as well as perception, a theory of inter-sensory correspondences surfacing in language as metaphorical expressions is complementary to the Sapir-Whorf (1956) hypothesis, which claims that the structure of language influences cognitive behaviour, rather than vice versa. The importance of the role that psychological synaesthesia would appear to play in verbal synaesthesia cannot be ignored; and accordingly, for a deeper insight behind the fundamental mechanisms of synaesthetic metaphor, we turn now to address each of the phases -- from the purely sensory to the purely verbal forms of synaesthesia -- in more detail. (3) Perceptual Synaesthesia Only a small minority of people experience sensory interfusion, where stimulation of a single sense evokes a mixture of sensory images. These individuals -— synaesthetes as they are technically called -- have truly synaesthetic experiences, where one specific stimulus arouses not only the appropriate, specific corresponding sensation, but also arouses a second sensation from a different modality, uniting it with the first (Werner,1940:86). To a synaesthetic individual, the taste of vinegar may conjure up bright greenness (i.e. coloured-taste synaesthesia); or to another, the sound of a violin may induce visual images of sparkling white and yellow stripes (i.e. coloured- hearing synaesthesia) (Marks,1975:303). To be sure, it is easy to dismiss these synaesthetic experiences as bizarre, idiosyncratic ways of perceiving -- a psychological perversity of "freak individuals who have neural cross-circuiting of the sensory fibres for two modalities; terms under which much of the earlier research into synaesthesia was designed and interpreted (osgood,1980:205). Although there is little doubt that many of these intersensory experiences can be ascribed to sheer idiosyncracy, many however, cannot. In particular, research into visual-auditory synaesthesia (i.e. coloured hearing), viz. the synaesthetically perceived colours of vowels and music, which comprises by far the largest body of literature into attested cases of cross-modal perception, has revealed that more often than not, there exist regular (4 ) and systematic correlations between dimensions of visual and auditory experience which remain consistent p from one synaesthete to another;^ and, more importantly, that these synaesthetic associations, far from being fortuitous, are "indissolubly bound up with the very development of the faculty of perception" (Werner, 1940:92-3), reflecting fundamental and important properties of human cognizing common in many respects to both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike. Indeed, Marks (1975) goes so far as to claim ....[that] synaesthesia [be] regarded not so much as a distinct, non-normal entity, but as the end point of a continuum on which sensory correspondences vary in strength, (p.316) The most powerful of sounds to arouse visual images synaesthetically are, unequivocally, speech sounds -- the sounds of vowels, to be more precise. In fact, Marks (1978:87ff.), on compilation of data from a large number of sources, including data from Reichart, Jakobson, & Werth (1949)3 , has come to the conclusion that ....[there are] several regular and systematic relations between vowels and synaesthetically induced colours. The vowel cl most often induces images of red and blue, e most often induces yellow and white, £ induces yellow, red, and white, £ induces red and black, and u and ou induces blue, brown, and black. 2. See Marks (1975) for an excellent chronological summary of literature on visual-auditory synaesthesia. 3. The study from Reichart, &t at. {1949) is particularly valuable in that investigation has been carried out on languages other than English, viz. German, Czech, Serbian, Hungarian, and Russian. (5) Although Marks admits that his survey lacks the precision of "appropriate phonetic description", the evidence is clear for the linguist: mid- to high front vowels induce light colours, back vowels induce dark colours. This dichotomy between light and dark colours may at least explain the 'special' (perhaps neutral?) status of red, which appears with front, mid, and back vowels -- for, according to Wierzbicka (in press), red is "perceived as maximally distinct from both 'light* colours and 'dark' colours. One may, however, prefer to opt for the explanation that mid- to high front vowels induce bright colours.4 Indeed, would not the high-pitched sound of [i] be described metaphorically as a bright sound if it were 'sung'? We diverge here