Sensory Metaphor
Sensory metaphor uses language associated with perception to describe another experience. A phrase may connect two sensory domains, or use sensory vocabulary for a feeling, judgement or idea. Synaesthetic metaphor commonly names the first of these relationships. Its occurrence in language does not, by itself, establish that the speaker experiences perceptual synaesthesia.[1]
Comparing sensory descriptions
These invented examples show different analytical possibilities. The proposed readings depend on the surrounding passage.
| Wording | Possible relationship | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| “The violin has a velvet sound.” | Texture used to describe hearing. | Which qualities of the sound are being compared: softness, smoothness, richness or something else? |
| “The cloth feels rough.” | A description within touch. | Is this a physical surface, or does a wider passage give rough another use? |
| “It was a bitter decision.” | Taste vocabulary applied to evaluation or feeling. | Is the decision painful, resented, disappointing, or described differently by the speaker? |
| “That explanation is clear.” | Visual vocabulary applied to understanding. | Does the passage develop an image of seeing, or use a familiar expression without elaboration? |
These distinctions help separate a cross-sensory comparison from a sensory description and from an extension into an abstract topic. They do not assign a fixed private experience to anyone who uses a word.
What a corpus can reveal
In Metaphor and Senses, Zawisławska examines Polish discourse through the Synamet corpus. The annotation records source and target frames together with grammatical information. In the reported corpus, vision was the most frequent sensory source frame and smell the most frequent target frame. The book also compares patterns across subject categories such as music, perfume and wine.[2]
The finding describes that corpus. The book's discussion of directionality distinguishes a philosophical ranking of the senses from the distribution of actual linguistic transfers. Comparing genres and languages is therefore more informative than assuming that every sensory metaphor follows one universal ladder.[2]
Synaesthesia, description and creativity
Turner and Littlemore compared writing by 20 adults who identified as synaesthetes and 20 who did not. Participants described liked and disliked sensory experiences and responded to emotion words. The authors analysed features including metaphor, cross-sensory associations and evaluation. The self-identified synaesthete group produced longer responses and drew on a wider range of senses; cross-sensory descriptions also occurred in the other group.[3]
Recruitment was online and group membership was self-reported. The authors discuss both classification uncertainty and the possibility that volunteers' awareness of their identity affected their responses. This is a study of elicited descriptions in a small sample, not a diagnostic test based on metaphorical wording.[3]
Questions for close reading
- What is being described, and which sensory vocabulary is used to describe it?
- Does the expression compare two senses, or apply sensory language to another topic?
- Is it an isolated phrase or part of an extended description?
- Which qualities does the surrounding text make relevant?
- Is an interpretation being inferred from wording, or reported by the person describing the experience?
Related pages
- Metaphor in Literature and Creativity
- Metaphors of Emotion
- Embodied Cognition
- Metaphor Identification and Corpus Research
- Metaphor Research Library
Sources
- ↑ Magdalena Zawisławska (2019), Metaphor and Senses: The Synamet Corpus. A Polish Resource for Synesthetic Metaphors, section 1.3, pp. 25–32. Peter Lang. Free complete book.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Zawisławska (2019), Metaphor and Senses, chapters 2–4, especially pp. 33–34, 67 and 98.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Sarah Turner and Jeannette Littlemore (2023), The Many Faces of Creativity: Exploring Synaesthesia through a Metaphorical Lens, sections 2.1–2.3 and 3.1–3.2, pp. 17–19 and 30–32. Cambridge University Press. Open access.