Abstract

For a large part of the twentieth century, synaesthetic linguistic metaphors were considered conceptual figures, literary tropes, rhetorical devices. In any case, they were not deemed useful tools for understanding the traits that make up our sensoriality. A substantially different picture emerges both from the latest developments in cognitive linguistics and semantics, and from contemporary neurophysiological research: within this framework, interest in the topics of sensory intermodality and in synaesthetic metaphors has been growing. This essay intends to show how what was drawn up in the different fields of German philosophical and psychological culture in the first decades of the twentieth century contains important indications on these topics and, in particular, on the role to acknowledge to phenomenological experience and natural language in order to understand our sensoriality and investigate its underlying physiological processes.