Directionalities of synesthetic mappings in Korean collocations

Abstract This study examines linguistic synesthesia in collocations, which has rarely been addressed in the field. The synesthetic collocations data are gathered from Korean, which is a less studied language in the literature. The study addresses two issues. The first issue is whether the Korean collocation synesthesia has a particular directionality of synesthetic mappings, and whether it shares the same patterns with synesthetic metaphors in Indo-European languages. The second issue is whether linguistic synesthesia in Korean collocations shows a rule-based or frequency-based directionality if it has a certain transfer directional pattern. The results reveal that the Korean synesthetic collocations confirm the synesthetic mapping hierarchy analyzed based on Indo-European languages, assuming its cross-linguistic universality from the perspective of rule-based unidirectionality. In addition, the collocation synesthesia in Korean shows particularities. For instance, the visual domain is maximized as sources, but neither olfaction nor audition functions are identified as source. Finally, this study discusses sensory verbs containing auxiliary verbs, wherein grammaticalization is clearly identified for the Korean collocational synesthesia.