Linguistic Synaesthesia in Turkish: A Corpus-Based Study of Cross-Modal Directionality

Abstract

Linguistic synaesthesia (i.e., synaesthetic metaphor, intrafield metaphor or cross-modal metaphor) refers to instances in which expressions in different sensory modalities are combined as in the case of sweet (taste) melody (sound). Ullmann (1957) and later, Williams (1976) were first to show that synaesthetic transfers seem to follow a potentially universal pattern that goes from the lower (i.e., touch, taste and smell) to higher senses (i.e., hearing and sight) but not the other way around (e.g., melodious sweetness) Studies across languages, cultures, domains, and text types presented mixed results as to the universality claim of cross-modal mappings in linguistic synaesthesia (e.g., Jo, 2019; Strik Lievers, 2015; Zhao et al., 2019). To extend results to an underrepresented language and thus, to test the universality of the directionality principle, 5699 cases of linguistic synaesthesia in written and spoken Turkish were investigated using a general-purpose, large corpus. Results show that except for the transfers from smell to hearing which is unidirectional, synaesthetic transfers in Turkish do not comply with the directionality principle in the strictest sense. Although most transfers that follow the canonical direction were also significantly more frequent, there were instances of “backward transfers”. Further, two of the backward transfers (i.e., from smell to touch and from taste to touch) were significantly more frequent than their canonical counterparts (i.e., from touch to smell and from touch to taste). Results are compared against synaesthesia in other languages and discussed in the framework of linguistic universals and embodied cognition. Supplemental materials: https://osf.io/2unvy