Synaesthesia is one of the most interesting phenomena in neurology, psychology, or cognitive linguistics. It is one of the most common types of metaphoric transfer in all languages (Williams, 1976). This paper focuses on synaesthetic metaphors of television food commercials in Mandarin Chinese. The data are collected from Taiwanese national television channels in the early evening hours on a weeknight in the winter of 2010 with the first 100 commercials that appeared being analyzed. The 26 food ads are analyzed by Yang’s (2000) classification and Day’s (1996) “hierarchical distribution”. The research goals are: (1) In regard to food commercial ads, which synaesthetic transfer has been used most frequently; (2) Do those conceptual mapping roles support Day’s (1996) theoretical framework of “hierarchical distribution”? The results show that the synaesthetic transfer from vision to taste is the most frequent route, and taste and emotion are the first two target domains. This mapping direction contradicts Day’s (1996) hypothesis of “hierarchical distribution.” Furthermore, the result also reflects language diversity in that synaesthetic metaphors may vary from culture to culture. To conclude, this study sheds light on how synaesthetic metaphors are applied in television food commercials in Mandarin Chinese.
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