The Contrast of Synesthesia Patterns of Tactile Words in Chinese and English: A Case Study ofRuanand Soft

Whether the model of synesthetic mapping of tactile words has language specificity is a topic of great interest in the academic field. By a quantitative comparison of synesthesia of tactile words of ruan软 in Chinese and soft in English in the Chinese and English corpus respectively, the tactile words were analyzed to explore the cognitive mechanism and rules behind lexical synesthesia. The results showed that, in both Chinese and English, the basic meaning of tactile words could be extended from synesthetic metaphor to the four sensory domains of sight, hearing, taste and smell. Sight and hearing were the dominant domains, taste and smell as supplement. The proportion of tactile words mapped to visual domain was higher in Chinese, while auditory domain in English. The above findings suggest that there is a similar physiological basis of synesthesia mechanism in different languages, but the synesthetic pattern is greatly influenced by the differences in the number of word definitions, prosodic features and cultural specificity.