Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Synaesthetic metaphors in perfume review discourse in english

by Milda Kukytė

The present paper focuses on the analysis of linguistic synaesthesia in the discourse of perfume reviews in English. The data for the analysis was collected from the videos of perfume reviews available on YouTube. The qualitative and quantitative corpus-based analysis employs the MPA (metaphorical pattern analysis) framework with a focus on the following four keywords: scent, perfume, fragrance and smell. The aim of the paper is to investigate which source domain of perception is most commonly used in linguistic metaphorical expressions when people try to describe the smells of perfumes. The results show that the most common source domain is gustatory experience, the second most frequent source domain is visual experience, and the third is tactile experience. The least common source domain in synaesthetic metaphors is auditory experience. The tendencies of sense directionality were found to partially correspond to the models established by the previous researchers, since some source domains that were found to be prevalent in the results of the current research were not expressed in other known models of sense directionality.