Jeannette Littlemore
‘He’s got a bit of a loose nappy’
Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning:
Metaphor and Metonymy in Institutional Discourse
Series A: General & Theoretical Papers
ISSN 1435-6473
Essen: LAUD 2008
Paper No. 694
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Jeannette Littlemore
University of Birmingham (UK)
‘He’s got a bit of a loose nappy’
Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning:
Metaphor and Metonymy in Institutional Discourse
Copyright by the author
2008
Series A
General and Theoretical
Paper No. 694
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Jeannette Littlemore
‘He’s got a bit of a loose nappy’
Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning:
Metaphor and Metonymy in Institutional Discourse
Introduction
This paper focuses on two cognitive processes which lie at the heart of much human thought
and communication: metaphor and metonymy. In very basic terms, metaphor draws on
relations of substitution and similarity, whereas metonymy draws on relations of contiguity.
In metaphor, one thing is seen in terms of another and the role of the interpreter is to
identify points of similarity, allowing, for example, Romeo to refer to Juliette as ‘the Sun’.
In metonymy, an entity is used to refer to something that it is actually related to, allowing us
to utter and understand statements such as: ‘The Whitehouse has released a statement’,
where the Whitehouse stands metonymically for the American Government. Jakobson
(1971) famously argued that metaphor and metonymy constitute two fundamental poles of
human thought, a fact which can be witnessed through their prevalence in all symbolic
systems including language, art, music, and sculpture. Both metaphor and metonymy work
at both a conceptual and a linguistic level. As Gibbs (1994) rather neatly puts it, they are
both ubiquitous in language, because they are part of our conceptual system. We can thus
talk about conceptual and linguistic metaphor, and conceptual and linguistic metonymy.
More often than not, metaphor and metonymy work together, and are so deeply embedded
in the language we use that we do not always notice them. However, languages vary both in
the extent to which, and the ways in which, they employ metaphor and metonymy, and this
can have important ramifications for those endeavouring to learn a second language.
Let us start by looking at conceptual and linguistic metaphor. According to the cognitive
linguistic paradigm, conceptual metaphors are cognitive structures that are deeply embedded
in our subconscious minds, whereas linguistic metaphors are surface level linguistic
phenomena. They are thought to be acquired in infancy, through our physical interaction with
the world, through the way in which we perceive the environment, move our bodies, and exert
and experience force. Other people’s habitual ways of selecting and using image schemas will
also be influential. The conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS manifests itself
in expressions such as: you have to construct your argument carefully; …but they now have a
solid weight of scientific evidence; the pecking order theory rests on sticky dividend policy.
One of the most productive conceptual metaphors is the conduit metaphor in which
communication is seen as transfer from one person to another, allowing us to talk, for
example, about conveying information, and getting the message across. Another conceptual
metaphor, PROGRESS THROUGH TIME IS FORWARD MOTION, results in expressions,
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such as plan ahead, back in the ’60s and to move on. In the same way, ARGUMENT is often
thought of in terms of WARFARE, UNDERSTANDING is often expressed in terms of
SEEING, LOVE is often thought of in terms of a PHYSICAL FORCE, and IDEAS are often
thought of in terms of OBJECTS. Linguistic metaphors are more of a surface-level
phenomenon, and unlike conceptual metaphors, the exact wording or the phraseology is an
important part of the meaning. Decoding linguistic metaphors may involve accessing the
relevant conceptual metaphor, but this will only get the decoder part of the way, and further
processing involving the use of context and phraseological patterning is usually required to
access the intended meaning. Languages vary both in terms of the conceptual metaphors they
use and the linguistic manifestations of these metaphors. The challenge for the language
learner is therefore to understand how the target language works, both at the conceptual level,
and the linguistic level.
For metonymy, it is the same. According to cognitive linguists, a small number of
higher order conceptual metonymies give rise to a wide range of metonymic expressions.
For instance, the PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT conceptual metonymy gives rise to
linguistic metonymies, such as the use of ‘Hoover’ to refer to all vacuum cleaners. The
AGENT FOR ACTION metonymy makes it possible for us to talk about ‘butchering a cow’
or ‘authoring a book’. Other common types of conceptual metonymy include: PART FOR
WHOLE metonymies, sometimes referred to as ‘synecdoche’ (e.g. ‘Bums on seats’ to refer
to the need to attract large numbers of students); WHOLE FOR PART metonymies (e.g.
‘the police turned up’; ‘Japan invaded Korea’); ACTION FOR COMPLEX EVENT
metonymies (e.g. let’s get the kettle on’, to refer to the act of making a cup of tea);
CATEGORY FOR MEMBER metonymies (e.g. ‘the pill’ to refer specifically to the
contraceptive pill, or ‘I need a drink’ which usually refers specifically to an alcoholic drink);
MEMBER FOR CATEGORY metonymies (e.g. ‘aspirin’ for any pain killing tablet);
DEFINING PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY metonymies (e.g. ‘the love interest’ or ‘some
muscle’); ACTION FOR OBJECT metonymies (e.g. ‘can you give me a bite?’);
POSSESSED FOR POSSESSOR metonymies (e.g. ‘he married money’ or ‘the suits
wouldn’t approve’); and CONTAINER FOR CONTAINED metonymies (e.g. ‘do you want
a glass?’). As with metaphor, there are limitations to the extent to which conceptual
metonymy can help us to understand and explain the wide variety of linguistic metonymies
that occur in everyday discourse, although it does give a rough indication of the more
common types. Like metaphor, metonymy abounds in everyday language where it acts as a
kind of shorthand, particularly amongst speakers who are very familiar with one another.
In many cases, metaphor and metonymy are so conventionalized that the people who
use them will not even see them as being particularly figurative. For instance, few speakers
of English would describe expressions such as ‘running through an agenda’, ‘looking over
some documents’ or ‘tabling a motion’ as particularly figurative, they might argue that
‘that’s just the way we say it’. And indeed for them, it is ‘just the way they say it’.
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However, for someone new to a particular discourse community, metaphor and metonymy
can be extremely opaque. For instance, when people in business talk about ‘verticals’
(to mean sectors) ‘ring-fencing’ (to talk about limiting budgetary liability) and ratchetmechanisms (to refer to economic systems that let prices go up, but not down) it may take a
considerable amount of imagination to get from the basic senses of these words (with which
the hearer may be familiar) to their abstract uses. Someone who has never encountered
expressions such as these, may interpret them as being highly figurative, and may employ
metaphoric or metonymic thinking in order to work out what they mean. In other words,
they may attempt to identify relations of substitution, similarity or contiguity between the
basic senses of these words and the contexts in which they are being used. Research has
shown that this is what language learners often do when they encounter figurative usages
which are new to them (Littlemore and Low, 2006). Of course, native speakers may do this
as well, but language learners face an additional challenge in that they also need to establish
whether the expression is in general use, or whether it is peculiar to this particular discourse
community. In the following section, we will look at the ways in which two discourse
communities use metaphor and metonymy, and the problems that this presents to outsiders,
who in this case, happened to be non-native speakers of English.
Figurative Language in two Discourse Communities
Discourse communities are purposeful groups of people where membership is achieved with
some effort or even membership rites, and whose language is often characterized by the use
of specific lexis (Swales, 1990). In institutional discourse communities, members tend to
work for, or are involved in the same overarching organization. The following two case
studies look at the nature of the spoken language used in two institutional discourse
communities. The first study looks at the language used by staff working at a nursery, and
the second study looks at the language used by university lecturers when they are delivering
lectures to undergraduate students. In each case study, much of the language that is unique
to the particular community appears to be figurative. In other words, each discourse
community appears to have its own specific figurative uses of language. In both case
studies, these figurative uses appeared to present difficulties to language learners attempting
to enter the community in question. Both case studies were conducted in summer 2007.
Case Study 1: The Nursery
I was recently talking to one of my postgraduate students, a woman from Singapore who has
studied English to an advanced level. She works at a local nursery, and she told me about an
interesting linguistic experience she had had there. When she first began working at the
nursery, she was puzzled by the expression ‘s/he’s got a loose nappy’, which was used
frequently by the nursery staff to talk about the babies. Whenever she heard this, she duly
checked that the baby’s nappy was fitted correctly. It was only after a few days in the
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nursery that she realised the expression did not mean that the nappy was literally loose, but
that it needed changing. What she had failed to understand was the fact that the expression
‘loose nappy’ was not being used literally, but metonymically, as a kind of euphemism, to
refer not to the nappy itself, but to the state of the bowels of the baby in question.
It has been suggested that the use of metaphor is a key defining characteristic of
discourse communities (Partington, 1998), but as we have seen in the example above,
metonymy, used to as a kind of shorthand, may be equally important. The loose nappies
appears to be a unique characteristic of this particular community. The ‘loose nappy’
expression was frequently used, and readily understood, by all the nursery staff, but it posed
problems to the newcomer. No examples of this expression can be found in the 450 millionword Bank of English corpus, which suggests that it is not in common usage outside this
particular discourse community. It can thus be seen as a characteristic figurative usage,
which in ways marks out, and contributes to the unique identity of this discourse
community. By using this expression, staff can indicate that they somehow ‘belong’.
Many of us have been in situations, where we have recently started new jobs and have
simply not understood what our colleagues are talking about, because they make extensive
use of metonymic shorthand. For instance, at the University of Birmingham, ‘Westmere’,
‘the corridor’ and ‘The Aston Webb’ are specific places on campus, which can be used to
refer to specific groups of people who work in those places, who do particular jobs. ‘The
corridor’ refers to undergraduate students in the Department of English, and those who
teach them. ‘Westmere’ refers to postgraduate students in the department, and the staff who
generally teach them, and ‘The Aston Webb’ refers to the often-derided university senior
management.
The use of metonymy to build identity and cohesion within discourse communities has
also been found in primary schools. Nerlich et al (1999) report on a child’s use of the
expression ‘I love being a sandwich’ to mean that he liked being one of the children who are
allowed to bring in a lunchbox, rather than eating a school dinner. The child’s use of the
expression is likely to have come from the institutional discourse of the school, where
defining characteristics are often used by the teacher to refer to groups of children as a kind
of convenient shorthand. My own children often report similar instances in their school,
where the groups of pupils are systematically referred to as ‘reds’, ‘green table’, ‘guitars’,
‘dinners’, and so on.
Intrigued by the ‘nappy’ example mentioned above, I encouraged my student (Tang) to
collect some spoken language data from the nursery. After having obtained the requisite
permission, Polly took two recording microphones into work with her for a two-week
period. One of them she wore herself, and the other was worn by various members of staff
working in the nursery. Polly was able to collect approximately twenty hours of language
spoken by staff in the nursery, which she then transcribed to compile a small corpus. The
corpus contains a mixture of language used between staff, and by staff when talking to the
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children. The language used by the children themselves was not transcribed for data
protection reasons. The corpus thus contains a representative selection of the spoken
language used by a particular workplace discourse community; the nursery staff. As part of
the study, Polly observed the extent to which the nursery staff adapted their language when
speaking to her, as a non-native speaker.
A striking feature of Polly’s corpus is the amount of figurative language of all types
that it contains, not just metonymy, but also metaphor, hyperbole, irony and understatement.
Of all these types of figurative language however, metonymy was the most ubiquitous, so
we will look at it in detail. In most cases the metonymy appeared to serve as a sort of
referential shorthand, which is perhaps to be expected in a community where information
has to be exchanged quickly and efficiently. I was interested to assess the extent to which
these usages were unique to this particular discourse community. I therefore compared them
to Bank of English data. The extracts below are all taken from Tang (2007) but the analyses
are my own. All the names in the data have been changed:
Extract 1
└don't forget you need to put in your numbers,
Kerri for that week.
She's gonna do Tuesdays and Fridays at 8am okay, and
also=Oh no, what you have
to do=do your numbers
Christine Right
and then if you got like a gap, she’ll have to put Thursday
Judy
so there you've got thirty-four
for Tuesday pm, just put
└so if I just put, just do my numbers and then
Christine
each /day/, I'll just
Write down, with Thomas, without Thomas, would that do
with Kerri, Kerri and Thomas?
Judy
In this extract, my/your numbers refers to the number of children for that age group coming
for that day or week. This usage appears to be highly specific to the discourse community. In
order to verify this, I conducted a Bank of English search for
my/your/our/his/her/their+numbers. In the vast majority of cases (over 90%), I found that the
word numbers, preceded by a possessive pronoun, referred to lottery numbers. In most cases,
unsurprisingly, the expression was preceded by the verb check. This usage occurs with such
frequency that it could be considered to be a fairly conventional metonymy in English.
However, in the nursery discourse, the expression was usually preceded by ‘do’, rather than
‘check’, and referred to something slightly different. ‘Doing one’s numbers’ therefore appears
to be a characteristic figurative usage by this particular discourse community.
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Extract 2
Judy
↑Hi, is that Judy?
Hi it's just Judy from XXXX. Sorry I had to go then
Have you got some sheets?
Did you say?
A ten till four
right?, okay,
okay, yap,
Yap
eight fifteen to two fifteen Tuesday
In this extract, sheets refer to a form which agency staff have to fill the number or hours
they have worked (usually for that week) in, and a ten till four refers to the time of the shift
for a member of agency staff. I was particularly interested in this last metonymy as it
appeared relatively frequently in the corpus (there were four recordings of its use). This
nominalisation involves a metonymic shift whereby the time that a person will be working
becomes a defining characteristic of that person. There also seems to be a degree of
objectification, or depersonification, which has been found to be a feature of some types of
institutional discourse (Ilie, 1998). Although this expression did appear in the Bank of
English, none of the uses were metonymic in quite the same way as the above example. The
citations in the Bank of English typically referred more conventionally to a ‘ten till four
shift’. There was just one metaphorical usage: ‘professionalism is not a nine-till-four
worker’, but even here the metaphoricity lies in the personification of professionalism,
rather than in the ‘nine-till-four’ expression itself. According to Polly, the nursery staff used
expressions such as ‘ten till four’ to refer to the actual person or employee, rather than the
shift. This depersonification metonymy can thus be viewed as a further example of a
characteristic figurative usage by this discourse community.
Staying with the theme of depersonification, the children themselves were often
depersonified by the staff in the nursery, when they were being talked about, as we can see
in the following extract:
Extract 3
Valerie
marie, one vege bowl and who else has Kerry got,
she's got Oliver and she's got urm…
Oliver and one meat bowl
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Here, the children are classified according to whether or not they are vegetarians or meat
eaters. Instead of being a ‘meat eater’, or ‘a child who eats meat’, the child in question
becomes a ‘meat bowl’. Again, the primary function seems to be the facilitation of speedy
communication, and it is the fact that they are so familiar with the nursery routines which
allows them to use these kinds of shortcuts. The Bank of English contained no examples of
this exact metonymy, which is perhaps to be expected as it is very specific. On the other
hand, the fact that ‘the ham sandwich on table eight’ (used by a waitress to refer to the
customer who happens to be eating the sandwich) is a widely-cited, and easily-understood
example in the literature on metonymy suggests that this slight variation on conceptual
metonymy POSSESSED FOR POSSESSOR is readily available to speakers of English. The
conceptual metonymy has been appropriated by the discourse community, but it has then
been given its own particular twist.
A common phenomenon in the data involved the changing of word class through
metonymic shorthand. In the following extract, the word ‘casuals’ is used to refer to one-off
sessions that children can come to on an ad hoc basis. Here, the word ‘casual’ shifts from
being an adjective to being a noun.
Extract 4
Valerie
Gian's daddy's phoned this morning and spoke to Tas
and Tas passed the phone call to me
and he wants some casuals for Tuesdays and
Wednesdays
A related sense of casuals does appear in the Bank of English, where it tends to refer to
temporary workers or teams. Applying this to the nursery context, we might expect it to
mean temporary members of staff, however this is not the meaning that it has in this
context. In the nursery, it is used to refer to the children, rather than to members of staff, and
therefore has its own context-specific meaning. Again, we have an example of a
characteristic figurative usage by this discourse community.
There were other instances of genre-specific uses of word class, which to some extent
may represent metonymic shifts in word class. These included: ‘on a visit’ (to refer to a child
who is spending time with the next group up in order to prepare for an imminent change in
group); and ‘biter’ to refer to a child who habitually bites other children. Although in the Bank
of English there are plenty of examples of the phrase ‘on a visit’, with similar meanings to those
used in the nursery, un-premodified use of the word ‘biter’ is only found in connection with
animals (and in one case, a woman), thus this usage particular seems to be restricted to the
nursery context. It may even indicate an underlying conceptual metaphor CHILDREN ARE
ANIMALS. On the other hand, the fact that this phrase was used in isolation, and the fact that
no other animal references were identified in the nursery corpus, means that we have
insufficient evidence to infer an underlying conceptual metaphor (Low, 2003).
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The main function of metonymy in all of the examples so far has been to serve as a
kind of communicative shorthand, however it was sometimes used for evaluative purposes.
Although she was unable to obtain recorded evidence for her corpus, Polly noted the
frequent use by members of the staff of the word ‘upstairs’ in expressions such as ‘I don’t
know what upstairs would think of that’ or ‘what is upstairs going to come up with next!’.
She believed that the reason why this usage was never recorded was related to the fact that
nursery workers to some extent censored what they said about the nursery management
when they were wearing the microphones. This reflects one of the weaknesses in this type
of research: it is difficult to obtain data on some of the stronger and more genuinely
evaluative uses of spoken language in workplace settings. However, to come back to Polly’s
observation, ‘upstairs’ was the location of the nursery office, where the senior management
were located. The word ‘upstairs’ was used by ordinary members of staff either to signal a
negative evaluation of the senior management, or as a distancing device reflecting
something of an ‘us and them’ mentality.
In her study of the nursery workplace discourse, Tang observes that the nursery staff
appeared, at least superficially, to adjust their language in order to make it easier for her to
understand. They sometimes did this by using the same sort of language that they used with
the children. In other words, they employed exaggerated intonation, spoke very slowly and
made use of frequent repetition, which Polly found to be somewhat patronizing. However,
one of the things that they did not do, which made them particularly difficult to understand,
was to avoid, or at least explain, the types of metonymy mentioned above. Even though she
has a high level of proficiency in English, it took Polly a while to work out exactly what
was meant by ‘loose nappies’, ‘numbers’, ‘upstairs’, and ‘visits’, and to some extent this
delayed her successful entry into the discourse community. It is probably a result of the
deeply embedded nature of these metonymies, the fact that they are used so frequently, and
the fact that, on the surface of it, the language used appears to be very simple, that the native
speakers did not think to adjust their metonymic language.
Case Study 2: Spoken Academic Discourse
The second case study looked at the role of metaphor and metonymy in spoken academic
discourse. Similar features were found to the nursery discourse, though there was more
metaphor and less metonymy. The study, which is reported in (Low et al., in press) used the
Pragglejaz (Pragglejaz group, 2007) technique to examine metaphor in four lectures in the
British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. We found that: in these lectures, the
metaphoric density ranged from 10 to 13%; the metaphors were usually evaluative, though
some were discourse-organising; the more active, stronger metaphors tended to be recurrent
(particularly personification); and there were a number of coherent metaphor clusters. One
such cluster is illustrated below:
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you know one of the worst examples of competing on price was Sainsbury and
Tesco's getting into a price war you know so Sainsbury's goes down threepence
on # baked beans you bastard fourpence on ravioli you swine frozen peas down
and who the hell wins…
now you have price wars when there is nothing else you can offer… then when
there is pressure when there is limited opportunity then you know it becomes
bare knuckle fighting it becomes price it becomes very intense competition now
you can you can surmise this without [inaudible] there's ways of combatting that
In this cluster, the COMPETITION IS FIGHTING metaphor seems to have been accepted
as the conventional way of talking about the subject within the discourse community. The
metaphors in these lectures were never explained to the students.
We therefore conducted a small follow-up study investigating the extent to which
metaphor in university lectures posed problems for non-native speakers (Chen et al, in
preparation). For the study, four lectures were chosen from a series of six attended over a
two-month period by International Foundation Year (IFY) students at Birmingham
University. The IFY is a year-long programme that helps international students develop
their academic and English skills prior to undergraduate study. The students spoke Arabic,
Chinese, Greek, Russian, Spanish, or Thai as their first languages. A group of IFY students
was given two activities for each of the four lectures. Because the activities were carried out
on different days for each of the lectures, the number of students in the group varied
between 4 and 18. For Activity 1 of each session, the students were given copies of the
lecture transcript. Instructions were printed on the handout and also read aloud. In the first
step, the students listened to the lecture videotape and, while doing so, underlined any
words or phrases that they found difficult to understand. The transcripts were divided into
several segments, which allowed a brief pause between each one. In the second step, the
students reviewed their underlined items, using highlighter pens to identify any words
whose meanings they simply did not know. This step was intended to help us to eliminate
from consideration any difficulties that might have been caused by entirely unknown word
meanings, rather than by metaphorical uses of known words. In Activity 2, the students
were asked to explain, using English or their own language, the meanings of various
figurative language items, as used in the lecture context.
Our results indicated that approximately 40% of the items marked as ‘problematic’ by
the students, were problematic because they were metaphorical. There was a large amount of
variation between the lectures. Results for the four lectures were 37%, 73.2%, 40%, and
37.8% respectively, which reflected the varying amounts of metaphor used by the different
lecturers. When we went on to ask the students to explain a number of metaphors in the
lectures, we found that they experienced a significant amount of difficulty. We then compared
their responses on this task to our findings from Activity 1 to gain an estimate of the extent to
which students were actually aware of their inability to understand metaphorical items. The
results of this study were quite striking. The students showed very little awareness of the
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problems that metaphor caused. The percentages of problematic items that they were actually
aware of were 6.2%, 7.5%, 11.4% and 15% for the four lectures respectively. In other words,
for the first lecture, of the items that they were unable to explain in Activity 2, only 6.2% had
been flagged up as difficult in Activity 1. The remaining three percentages correspond to the
other three lectures. These findings indicate that metaphor in university lectures presents
considerable difficulties for international students, and that, to a large extent, the students
themselves are unaware of the problems it presents.
The findings from both of these case studies indicate that metaphor and metonymy can
present significant problems to learners of English, and that to a large extent both the
students and the native speakers are unaware of the problem. In neither of the case studies
did the members of the discourse community attempt to paraphrase their figurative language
for the non-native speakers. This suggests that they did not perceive their figurative
language as being a potential source of difficulty for language learners, or that they felt the
onus was on the learners to acquire the necessary linguistic competence to understand it.
One reason for this could be that the words in the expressions themselves are often very
basic, and it is the particular figurative usages that are difficult to understand.
All of this means that learners of English need to be equipped to deal with figurative
usages such as these when they encounter them. It may not be sufficient for language
teachers simply to teach figurative expressions to their learners. They may also need to help
them to develop useful interpretation strategies so that when they are faced with an
unfamiliar figurative usage of a word they are otherwise familiar with, they will be able to
understand what it means. By and large, this will involve making appropriate use of
contextual cues, but it may also involve a degree of ‘figurative thinking’ (Littlemore and
Low, 2006). In the following section, I look more closely at figurative thinking, and review
a number of studies that I have conducted in order to find ways of helping students to
develop this skill.
Accessing the Figurative Thinking Processes of foreign Language
Learners and Helping them to Understand and Use Figurative Language
more Effectively
Figurative thinking is the capacity to perceive metaphoric and metonymic relationships
between the senses of words and the contexts in which they are used. It is the type of
thinking that a learner will need to engage in if he or she wants to understand, for example,
the lecturer’s use of the word ‘wars’ in the above extract. It may involve recourse to a
relevant conceptual metaphor or metonymy, but many of the relationships will also need to
be identified or created in an ad hoc manner, as and when the learner encounters them.
There is thus a strong ‘procedural’ component to figurative thinking.
In previous papers, I have argued that the key psychological processes involved in
figurative thinking are: noticing, schema activation, associative fluency; analogical
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reasoning; image formation; and the use of context. In a series of studies, I have investigated
the potential of exploiting these processes to help learners deal with metaphor and
metonymy in the foreign language. I have found that helping learners to use the strategy of
focusing on the attributes of the source domain term can help them work out the meaning of
future metaphors (Littlemore and Azuma, submitted). I have also found that getting them to
form images of the source domain term can help, but that there is considerable inter-student
and inter-item variation (Littlemore, 2004a, b and c; in press). Finally, I have found that it is
beneficial (albeit in a somewhat restricted sense) to expose learners to language corpora to
help them understand and use figurative language (MacArthur and Littlemore, in press).
These studies have focused mainly on figurative thinking strategies for vocabulary
learning and use. As such, they may help learners to understand and use the characteristic
figurative usages mentioned above at a very basic level. There is, however, much more to
communication than understanding and production. Learners also need to appreciate the
communicative functions of the figurative language that they hear and use. In other words,
they need to learn how to use figurative language to persuade, conciliate, entertain, or
whatever else they want to do. I have argued elsewhere that the ability to understand and
produce metaphor and metonymy in a foreign language can make a significant contribution
to a learner’s all-round communicative competence (Littlemore and Low, 2006 a, b) so, in
this final section, I will briefly sum up the main ideas. Our main argument is that, despite
recent developments in cognitive linguistics, the ability of foreign language learners to use
metaphor and metonymy is still sometimes seen as ‘the icing on the cake’. This somewhat
restricted view is exemplified by models of communicative language ability, which make
little mention of a learner’s ability to produce and comprehend metaphors. One example is
Bachman’s (1990) widely-used model of communicative language ability.
In Bachman’s model, communicative language ability consists of: grammatical competence
(the ability to use the grammar of the target language); textual competence (the ability to
appreciate the overall conceptual structure of discourse, and to understand the effect this is likely
to have on the reader or listener); illocutionary competence (the ability to interpret the ideational,
interactional, and manipulative functions of a given piece of discourse); sociolinguistic
competence (sensitivity to, or ability to control the conventions of language that are determined
by the context); and strategic competence (the ability to use language interactively, and to convey
their message, despite gaps in their knowledge of the target language).
In Bachman’s model, the ability to use figurative language is presented as a small
subsection of sociolinguistic competence. However, the ability to produce, and interpret
metaphor and metonymy is likely to be involved in all areas of the model. In the area of
grammatical competence, findings from cognitive linguistics have demonstrated the extent
to which metaphor and metonymy are involved in abstract uses of prepositions, phrasal
verbs (Sweetser, 1990), tense (Tyler and Evans, 2001) and modality (Talmy, 1988). In the
area of textual competence, several studies by Drew and Holt (e.g. 1998) have shown in a
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very clear way that people systematically use figurative language to summarise and close
off encounters or to change topics. Metaphor is also used to help structure the argument
within units of text or talk (Cameron and Low 2004). In the area of illocutionary
competence, many indirect speech acts involved metaphor or metonymy, and figurative
thinking is often required to get from the utterance to the intended meaning. In the area of
sociolinguistic competence, understanding metaphor involves an appreciation of the
extended meanings and evaluations given by a specific culture to particular events, places,
institutions, or people. It is often argued that cultures make extensive use of conceptual
metaphor (Shore 1996; Kimmel 2004), so that a knowledge of shared cultural references is
necessary if one is to understand or produce the target language with any degree of accuracy
(Lantolf, 1999). Finally, in the area of strategic competence, many of the compensation
strategies that learners use when unsure of a word in the target language involved analogy,
and these analogies are often highly figurative (Littlemore, 2003). More work is needed to
investigate how learners can be helped to deal with metaphor and metonymy in all these
areas. It is highly likely that the ability to ‘think figuratively’ will contribute to a student’s
overall level of communicative language ability.
Finally, more work needs to be done on the ways in which metaphor and metonymy
interact with other figures of speech, such as hyperbole and irony, to communicate meaning,
and on the challenge that this presents to language learners. To the best of my knowledge,
no one has yet looked at the ways in which learners deal with these other types of figurative
language. Future research could usefully take a more discourse analytic approach to the
study of the ways in which different types of figurative language work together to shape
meaning and identity, and the ways in which language learners can be helped to make
effective use of figurative language to develop their communicative language ability.
Research in this area would make a very useful contribution to second language pedagogy.
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