Was kann uns schwache sprachliche Synästhesie über „starke synästhetische Metapher“ sagen? Schwache vs. starke Synästhesie im Deutschen und deren Problemstellen veranschaulicht am Beispiel des Lexems Freude
What Can Weak Linguistic Synaesthesia Tell us about “Strong Synaesthetic Metaphor”? – Weak vs. Strong Synaesthesia in German and its Problematic Issues Exemplified on the Analysis of the Lexeme Freude

Summary/Abstract: Synaesthesia is undoubtedly a very complicated and complex phenomenon. Regarding its nature and definition, it poses a wide variety of difficulties not only from the neurocognitive but especially from the linguistic perspective. Both, the weak and strong linguistic synaesthesias are generally considered as metaphors. The first part of the paper aims at presenting at first the types of synaesthesia and some problematic issues with its definition from the neurocognitive perspective. Subsequently, various approaches to the linguistic-conceptual nature of synaesthesia as well as related problematic theoretical and analytical questions are discussed; especially those pertaining to regarding synaesthesia as a metaphor (much more seldom is this phenomenon interpreted as metonymy, metaphor or neither of them). It has been shown that from the theoretical point of view the weak linguistic synaesthesia can unequivocally be classified as a metaphor. Similar unambiguous categorisation in the case of strong linguistic synaesthesia is questionable. Based on the analysis of the co-ocurrences of the lexeme Freude in corpus, the second part of the paper demonstrates that even seemingly uncomplicated instances of weak synaesthesia turn out to be puzzling and pose some problems in terms of their interpretation. Depending on the contextual embedding, they can be viewed as metaphors or metonymies (of different types). This leads to the following conclusion: if the weak linguistic synaesthesia cannot unequivocally be seen as a metaphor, it is much less possible to classify the strong linguistic synaesthesia generally as a metaphor. In such a complex domain as perception, the contextual embedding is of fundamental importance for the categorisation of the synaesthetic expression.

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