Metaphor in Foreign Language Instruction

Ana María Piquer-Píriz, Rafael Alejo-González

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110626872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Exploring the role that metaphor plays in our linguistic and conceptual systems from a Cognitive Linguistics (CL)-oriented perspective has attracted a great deal of attention for the past three decades. The analysis of the applications of some theoretical tenets of CL (mainly the notion of linguistic motivation) has been particularly fruitful in foreign language (L2) instruction. However, despite some important research findings related to the presentation of word meanings as systematically connected, metaphor is still rarely included as an important part of language courses designed for L2 learners.

This volume explores the important role of metaphor in L2 instruction by presenting both theoretical accounts and empirical studies into the topic. Part I comprises four theoretical chapters that touch upon issues of continuing relevance to the discipline (e.g. why metaphor is relevant for L2 learners and how it can be effectively taught) and introduce areas in need of further research (metaphor in L2 instruction in languages other than English or metaphor and young L2 learners). Part II consists of eight empirical studies that illustrate methodological challenges and best practices when analyzing metaphor in real L2 contexts.

Part I. Theoretical Considerations: Reviews and Perspectives

The Particularities of Metaphorical Experience: An Appreciation of Fiona MacArthur’s Metaphor Scholarship

Raymond W. Jr. Gibbs

4450, Esta Lane, 95073, Soquel, CA, USA

1 The Particularities of Metaphorical Experience

Being a metaphor scholar is really hard work. I recently talked with an old friend, a neurosurgeon, about my own life as a metaphor scholar. He asked pointed questions about what metaphor was, how I studied it as a cognitive scientist, what theories explained metaphor in language and thought, and, finally, why on earth I decided to devote my life to the topic of metaphor in the first place. After hearing my different responses to these questions, my friend commented that metaphor seemed vague, even ethereal, and wondered if any progress in the scientific study of metaphor could ever occur. My old friend even said, and this is an exact quote, “It sounds to me that operating on people’s brains is much easier than studying something like metaphor”. I laughed at this response, but could not argue with its validity as studying metaphor can often be terribly challenging (even if also quite rewarding).

I admire most of the people in the metaphor community for their courage in the work they do, and have special appreciation for Fiona MacArthur and her scholarship over many years. In my view, she distinguishes herself as a metaphor scholar, par excellence, for approaching metaphor with a keen eye toward the particularities of metaphorical experience in all of its glorious, messy details. Quite a few of us in the multidisciplinary world of metaphor research examine metaphor from a God’s eye perspective and aim to capture some of the important generalities about metaphor in broad theoretical terms. Indeed, some of the most famous theories of metaphor have evolved from the consideration of only a few, often literary, examples of metaphor, or from instances noted in dictionaries, or from isolated expressions that arise from our own minds or memories. Others of us look at metaphor as it exists in real discourse, but then scrape the metaphors out of these contexts to draw larger generalizations about metaphor and the presumed people who produce and understand these selected examples. Still others, including myself, study people’s understandings of verbal metaphor in scientific experiments, but here too quickly draw inferences from the small group of participants and specific verbal metaphors examined to offer grand conclusions about human minds and unconscious, fast-acting processes of metaphor acquisition and interpretation. Finally, other scholars investigate metaphorical discourse in order to draw larger generalizations about how metaphor always emerges from cultural ideas and beliefs. These differing perspectives each offer potentially important insights into the ways metaphor operates in thought, language, and expressive communication. But it is still often the case that these varying approaches to metaphor are seen as competing with one another rather than pointing toward a more harmonious and detailed picture of the adaptive value of metaphor in human life.

Fiona MacArthur has long resisted the temptation to draw facile conclusions about the ways metaphor works in human interaction. She looks at the particularities of how metaphor emerges in discourse and offers a cautionary voice about not ignoring some of the complexities of metaphor use simply because so many of us are primarily interested in grand theories of metaphor. Reading her many publications over the years offers a mosaic, a tapestry of observations about many of the detailed realities of metaphor that are too often ignored in many of the ongoing debates about how people, especially non-native speakers, learn and communicate with metaphorical language. The enduring impression I get from reading each one of her articles is the warning to fellow metaphor research of “Not so fast! Slow down and see how the complexities of metaphorical language use must be a fundamental part of any attempt to theorize about metaphor”.

I now review a select few of her scholarly works to both remind us of their important empirical findings and to understand some of the deeper themes that motivate her research as a metaphor scholar. A key focus of my appreciation of her research is that metaphorical language use is always inherently situated in, and emerges from, very particular social, cultural, and environmental circumstances, which make up the “ecology of metaphor”. Thinking of metaphor as a resource to meet individual and collective adaptive needs entails certain methodological commitments and attention to the dynamics of how metaphor unfolds.

2 A Case Study of the Primary Metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

The introduction of “primary metaphors” within cognitive linguistics added a new dimension for characterizing the relations between bodily experience with metaphorical thought and language (Grady 1997). Primary metaphors reflect strong correlations in everyday embodied experiences, such as the following:

INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS

“We have a close relationship”.

DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS

“She’s weighed down by responsibilities”.

AFFECTION IS WARMTH

“They greeted me warmly”.

IMPORTANT IS BIG

“Tomorrow is a big day”.

MORE IS UP

“Prices are high”.

SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS

“Those colors aren’t the same, but they’re close”.

CHANGE IS MOTION

“My health has gone from bad to worse”.

PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS

“He’ll be successful, but isn’t there yet”.

CAUSES ARE PHYSICAL FORCES

“They pushed the bill through Congress”.

KNOWING IS SEEING

“I see what you mean”.

UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING

“I’ve never been able to grasp complex math”.

These metaphorical correlations arise out of our embodied functioning in the world. In each case, the source domain of the metaphor comes from the body’s sensorimotor system. A primary metaphor is a metaphorical mapping for which there is an independent and direct experiential basis that can be expressed within language. Although primary metaphors are often viewed as having a universal character given their roots in embodied correlations, not all languages exhibit the same primary metaphors, such as for example UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013).

How do second-language learners of English use and understand a primary metaphor such as UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING? MacArthur, Krennmayr and Littlemore (2015) explored the relevance of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING in a series of 27 conversations (EuroCoAT corpus) between university instructors of English and their international students at five European universities (i.e., Ireland, England, The Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden). These conversations were all in English while the students were all native Spanish speakers. In general, the UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING metaphor appeared frequently in these conversations, notably because the topics of learning and knowledge were the primary foci of these talk exchanges. Still, there were important variations in the ways that the English instructors and the Spanish students referred to UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING.

The students were asked, prior to the meetings with their instructor, to propose several questions on topics related to the course materials and assignments. The resulting conversations lasted between 7 and 22 minutes, yielding a corpus of over six hours of discourse. About 2/3 of the words were produced by the instructors and 1/3 by the students. An analysis of the talk using corpus analytic tools (Wmatrix) and hand analyses showed that the instructors used terms related to “sight” far more so than did the students. A further analysis using the “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP) (Pragglejaz Group 2007) was attempted to determine which instances of the “sight” terms possibly conveyed metaphorical meaning related to understanding. However, some examples appeared to indicate both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings at the same time (e.g., an instructor said, “I have some not so good responses to some questions and you will see what people have done in the past” as he showed the student some examples of what other students had done in the past). For this reason, the analysis revealed three types of “sight” examples (i.e., metaphorical, non-metaphorical, and conflations of both metaphorical and non-metaphorical).¹

The instructors, furthermore, employed a larger range of “sight” terms (e.g., “see”, “look”, “focus”, “view”, “reflect”, “observe”, “notice”, “spot”, “visible”) than did the students (e.g., “”focus”, “look”, “see”, “watch”). Overall, 40% of all metaphorically used “sight” terms employed the lexical item “see,” followed by “look” (33%) and “focus” (12%). Most interestingly, the students used “see” in different ways than did the lecturers. For example, students often used “see” in the passive voice (e.g., “saw” and “have seen”), while the instructors used “see” in the active voice. The instructors also did not typically use “see” to refer to moments of understanding in the past (e.g., “I could see that … .”), but preferred to use “see” metaphorically when talking about current or future actions (e.g., “You’re not going to be able to see that they will be analyzed … ”). Many of the instructors’ uses of “see” were conflations (e.g., “Okay, yeah that fine you can also … as was seen in the – in the film Fresca … ”), which mostly reflects cases of understanding that involved visual materials such as films, books, exams, etc. Instructors also signaled their understanding of students’ comments through the metaphorical use of “see” (e.g., “right right I see … so will will you use grammar books?”), but the students rarely employed “see” in this manner. In fact, the one instructor, who was a native speaker of Spanish, also did not employ “see” as a way of signaling understanding of students’ questions or comments. This finding suggests that vision may not be a typical way of referring to learning in Spanish, especially in the context of Spanish academics talking with their students.

Students sometimes responded to instructors’ uses of sight metaphors by also displaying their learning through similar metaphors (e.g., “I have to be more clear” and “This introduction has to be more focused”). But a further analysis of the discourse contexts in which UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING appeared indicated that English and Spanish speakers think of this metaphor in different ways. In many cases, students failed to pick up on the instructors’ use of sight metaphors even when the instructors gestured in metaphorical ways about UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (e.g., fingers splayed outward as the hand moved downward toward the desk to note what must be focused on).

MacArthur, Krennmayr and Littlemore (2015) offered several conclusions from their analysis of the instructor-student conversations:

To a certain extent, the mismatch between the lecturers’ and the students’ metaphorical use of the sight terms can be attributed to the different roles played by the participants in these mentoring sessions. The lecturers see their role as supporting the students’ efforts to learn through ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Theoretical Considerations: Reviews and Perspectives
• Taking Stock after Three Decades: “On Teaching Metaphor” Revisited
• Figurative Language and Young L2 Learners
• Metaphor and Spanish as a Foreign Language
• Part II. New Empirical Studies
• Metaphorical Reasoning in Comprehension and Translation: An Analysis of Metaphor in Multiple Translations
• Metaphorical Alignment in Cross-Cultural Office Hours’ Consultations
• Development of L2 Metaphorical Production
• Measuring Secondary-School L2 Learners Vocabulary Knowledge: Metaphorical Competence as Part of General Lexical Competence
• Part II. 2. Fostering Knowledge of L2 Figurative Language
• “The Manage of Two Kingdoms Must”: An Analysis of Metaphor in Two CLIL Textbooks
• An Enactment-Based Approach to the Teaching of Metaphoric Expressions: A Case of Saudi EFL Learners
• Subject Index