Paths of linguistic synesthesia across cultures

Abstract

The article focuses on the conventionalized cross-sensory uses of basic-level adjectives in a sample of eight languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Tajik, and Uzbek. After a differentiation of cross-sensory language use (also called linguistic synesthesia) from other phenomena that combine the senses (namely, neuropsychological synesthesia and cross-sensory correspondences), it reports on a dictionary-based semantic analysis that distinguishes between three main semantic mechanisms leading to cross-sensory language use: direct cross-sensory transfer (e.g., a dark sound), more schematic generalized meanings (e.g., soft ‘pleasant, gentle, not too intense’), and highly figurative extensions (e.g., a dark melody, in which dark means ‘gloomy’). It also emphasizes that these three categories are often intertwined due to the inherent fog-like nature of meaning. After summarizing every instance of conventionalized cross-sensory meaning potential that could be found in the dictionaries, it concludes that (1) the results are in line with the widely observed directional preferences also referred to as the hierarchy of the senses; (2) the evaluative dimension is present in many transfers, but it cannot account for the extended uses alone; (3) there are some obvious differences between the Western and the Central Asian languages, even though one cannot speak of fundamentally different conceptual systems regarding the language of the senses. Besides these general observations, the outcomes of this principally exploratory investigation also point to many uncharted territories to be examined in future studies.