The Sweet Smell of Red - An Interplay of ... - metaphorik.de

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metaphorik.de 18/2010
As Eysenck (1993:11) says, „perception refers to the way in which we interpret
the information gathered (and processed) by the senses”, interpretation being
the crucial part in this process.
Synaesthetic metaphors exist in two forms, weak and strong. Interestingly
enough, this distinction completely agrees with the neurological distinction of
higher and lower (Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001), respectively strong and
weak synaesthesia (Martino and Marks 2002). The most common form of
synaesthesia (grapheme-color synaesthesia) is, strictly speaking, not a
combination of two senses, but rather a cross-modal combination as color
(vision) is interlinked with letters, words or numbers. Therefore this type of
synaesthesia is called weak... Only the strong type, which is much rarer,
combines two actual sense experiences like seeing sounds for example.
Synaesthetic metaphors exist in those two forms as well. The difference
between weak and strong forms is the target domain, this means, the structure
of strongly synaesthetic metaphors combines a synaesthetic modifier with a
synaesthetic head, while in weak metaphors only the source domain comes
from a perceptual domain. The source domain has to be perceptual, otherwise
a metaphor cannot be called synaesthetic. Differently put, in strongly
synaesthetic metaphors the target as well as the source domain are both
perceptual, while weakly synaesthetic metaphors only show one perceptual
domain.
3. The senses
How many human senses are there? The answer is not that simple. The most
common assumption is that there are five senses. These are vision, hearing,
taste, smell and touch. We might consider this division as logical and natural,
as we view the senses mostly as limited to receiving data from the world in a
passive rather than an active way. This question, however, has been discussed
by many people and is not a very recent one either. Day (1995:23) explains that
this division of the senses into five is plainly culturally based and there are
other cultures which acknowledge more senses, others less. Again, it was
Aristotle who was involved in the question of the division of the senses and
set the standard of five that we view as normal nowadays. A further division
of touch into the additional temperature and pain perception is possible.
Furthermore, Aristotle declared the ranking of the senses to be in the order of