What is it about?
This study explores how people describe one sense (such as sound) using words from another sense (such as touch), a phenomenon known as linguistic synaesthesia. For example, when we talk about a "warm voice", we are using a touch-related word (warm) to describe something we hear (voice). This research looks at thousands of examples from Turkish to see if people follow a pattern when making these connections - for example, moving from 'lower' senses like touch and taste to 'higher' senses like sight and hearing.
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Why is it important?
Linguistic synesthesia is found in many languages, but most studies have focused on English and other Indo-European languages. This research fills an important gap by analysing Turkish, a language from the Turkic family. The results show that Turkish follows similar patterns to other languages, but also has unique features. Understanding these patterns can help linguists, translators and even artificial intelligence systems that process human language. The study also gives us an insight into how our brains naturally connect different types of sensory experience through language.
Perspectives
This study allowed me to explore very interesting metaphorical patterns in Turkish and compare them with other languages. One surprising finding was that while Turkish generally follows the expected hierarchy of sensory mappings, it also shows some unexpected tendencies - such as taste being a more dominant source than in other languages.
Dr. Alper Kumcu
Hacettepe Universitesi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Linguistic Synesthesia in Turkish: A Corpus-based Study of Crossmodal Directionality, Metaphor and Symbol, October 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2021.1921557.
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