The Cognitive Accessibility of Synaesthetic Metaphors Markus Werning (werning@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de) Jens Fleischhauer (fleischhauer@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de) Hakan Be¸ seo˘ glu (beseoglu@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de) Department of Philosophy, Heinrich-Heine University D¨ usseldorf Universit¨ atsstr. 1, 40225 D¨ usseldorf, Germany Abstract A (strongly) synaesthetic metaphor (e.g., loud yellow ) is a metaphor that results from a combination of a modi- fier and a head, where both express perceptual qualities. Not all synaesthetic metaphors are cognitively equally accessible. In this paper the factors that enhance or re- duce the cognitive accessibility of those metaphors are explored for the German language. The order of the sense modalities from which the modifiers and heads were taken turned out to be a significant factor for the accessibility of a metaphor, although earlier claims of a linear order of modalities could be disconfirmed. The frequency of the overall use of a modifier in the language and its morphological status as derived or not derived also turned out to be a significant factor, whereas the frequency of the head had no significant influence. Introduction The phenomenon of synaesthesia has gained increasing attention over the last ten years (Baron-Cohen & Har- rison, 1997; Harrison, 2002; Cytowic, 2002). It has a neurological as well as a linguistic aspect. The neuro- logical phenomenon describes the abnormal interaction of neural processes regarding different senses or modal- ities. According to varying estimates it occurs in about 1/20000 to 1/200 of the population (Cytowic, 1997; Baron-Cohen, Burt, Smith-Laittan, Harrison, & Bolton, 1996; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Subjects with synaesthesia in the neurological sense, e.g., have the phe- nomenal impression of color when they hear a particular tone (‘C-sharp is blue’). Martino and Marks (2001) dis- tinguish between strong and weak synaesthesia depend- ing on whether the abnormal interaction is cross-sensory or simply cross-modal. According to them, subjects with the above mentioned sound-color interaction would ex- emplify strong synaesthesia, whereas subjects, who, e.g., have a particular color impression when they see a par- ticular grapheme (‘The 2 is yellow’) would be cases of weak synaesthesia. Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) go even further and subsume also the abnormal connection of a phenom- enal quality with an abstract object under the notion of synaesthesia. Some subjects, e.g., connect a visual im- pression with a day of the week (‘Monday is red’). For Ramachandran and Hubbard those are cases of higher synaesthesia, while they count cross-sensory and cross- modal interactions as lower synaesthesia. According to them, the lower form is located in lower cortical regions, e.g., the fusiform gyrus, while the higher form is located in higher cortical regions like the angular gyrus. The neurological phenomenon must be distinguished from synaesthesia as a phenomenon in natural languages. Here it typically occurs in the context of metaphors and is not restricted to a small proportion of the population. According to prominent theories of metaphors (Black, 1962; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), any metaphor results from a mapping of some concept from a source domain (SD) onto a concept of some target domain (TD). In the metaphorical sentence (1) The road bows down into the valley a concept from the source domain of bodily motion (ex- pressed by the verb bow ) is mapped onto a concept from some geographical target domain (expressed by the noun road ). The reader is now forced to transform the source concept in order to match it to the target concept. Thus the metaphorical interpretation of the composed expres- sion results. In the case of synaesthetic metaphors, the source do- main (SD) – in adjective-noun constructions typically the domain of the modifier – is restricted to concepts of perception, which make up the perceptual domain (PD). A rough, but natural classification of the perceptual do- main can be made along the five senses: color, sound, touch, smell, and taste. This leads to a classification of the following examples: (2) The old woman had an open heart (3) The rich man had a cold heart (4) The stone statue had a cold smell Example (2) is a metaphor, but not a synaesthetic one because the modifier does not come from a perceptional domain. The second and the third case pass the defini- tion and, therefore, are synaesthetic metaphors. They are, however, quite different with respect to their target domain. In (4) the target domain and the source domain both are from PD, whereas in (3) only the source domain is. We, therefore, call the former a strongly synaesthetic metaphor and the latter a weakly synaesthetic metaphor : Definition (Synaesthetic Metaphor) A metaphor is synaesthetic if and only if its source domain is percep- tual. It is only weakly synaesthetic if its target is not also 2365 Werning, M., Fleischhauer, J., & Beseoglu, H. (2006). The cognitive accessibility of synaesthetic metaphors. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2365–70). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London.