The Sweet Smell of Red

An Interplay of Synaesthesia and Metaphor in Language

Résumé

The human senses are not only important to us in our daily interaction with the world but also in our daily communication. We rely so heavily on them that we do not notice how often we fall back on them when we talk. Not only do we use them in their literal version – which we might think would be the most common usage – we also use them metaphorically. Sometimes the metaphorical usage of a sense is even more frequent than its literal usage and which can even mean that a sense is used almost exclusively in its metaphorical form. These metaphors can occur in two versions: strong and weak synaesthetic. The first form has a sense related term in the target as well as the source domain, while the weak version only has such a term in the source domain. This paper is concerned with the occurrence of senserelated terms and their behavior in language. It will investigate how the adjectives that I consider the best representation for each sense occur in English and German, if they differ in their metaphorical representation from their literal usage and if tendencies can be found in regard to the senses they can co-occur with.