Abstract
The aim of this paper is to compile a list of German lexicalised synaestheses and to compare them to a list of Italian lexicalised synaestheses. Before doing so, some of the most fundamental studies on synaesthesia are summarised in order to introduce notions such as directionality of transfer, hierarchy of the senses and accessibility of synaesthetic metaphors. Afterwards, the main semantic, morphological and syntactic characteristics of lexicalised synaestheses are described, for instance polysemy of adjectives and syntactic configuration. In the main part of the paper, the German lexicalised synaestheses, which have been extracted from the Duden-dictionary, are organised according to the source and target domain. Compared to the Italian lexicalised synaestheses, it turns out that the numerical distribution of adjectives among the five canonical senses is almost identical. Moreover, the major directionalities of synaesthetic transfer are the same in both languages, thus confirming the findings of earlier studies (touch as the main source domain and hearing as the main target domain). The final part of the work is dedicated to the equivalence of some German and Italian synaestheses.