A Metaphorical Analysis of Five Senses and Emotions in Mandarin Chinese

Emotions can be expressed by the five major external senses of human beings (i.e. vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste) via metaphors. Previous studies have mainly explored the relation between the five senses and emotions from the perspectives of physiology and cognition, and research on the five senses focuses on their semantic meanings. This paper attempts to investigate their relation based on corpus linguistics, centering on sensory verbs and emotional words. It is found that in Mandarin Chinese, five basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise) can be expressed via olfactory, tactile, visual, and auditory modalities while among these five basic emotions, surprise cannot be expressed through taste.