The effect of cultural background on metaphor interpretation

This article describes a study that investigated the ways in which Bangladeshi students interpreted metaphors used by their lecturers during a short course at a British university. The students were asked to interpret a number of metaphors presented in context. They were also asked to identify the value judgements that were being expressed through these metaphors in these particular contexts. Culture-specific assumptions about the target domains appeared to affect the students’ recognition of the lecturers’ attitudes to the issues they were discussing. In order to identify areas of disparity between the (working) cultures of the Bangladeshi students and their British lecturers, Hofstede’s (1980) cultural values questionnaire was administered. The students were found to be more likely than their lecturers to favour uncertainty avoidance, and to favour high power distance at work. The kinds of (mis)interpretations that the students made of (the evaluative content of) the metaphors appeared in accordance with these cultural differences. Implications of these findings are discussed

Metaphoric competence and communicative language ability

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning

What do learners need to know about the figurative extensions of target language words?: a contrastive, corpus-based analysis of Thread, Hilar, Wing and Aletear

This article provides a detailed analysis based on corpus evidence of the multiple senses of the English verbs thread and wing and the Spanish verbs hilar and aletear. Although these verbs derive from nouns with similar or identical referential content, the figurative extensions of their basic meanings are quite different and can be seen to constitute more than one single continuum of senses. Rather, different branches or strands of figuratively related senses can be discerned, with major shifts in meaning often being associated with particular phraseological or grammatical patterns. The findings of this contrastive analysis are discussed in relation to the learning of the semantic potential of target language words in foreign language learning.En este artículo, presentamos un análisis detallado de los varios sentidos traslaticios de los verbos ingleses thread y wing y los verbos hilar y aletear en español. Aunque estos verbos surgen de unos sustantivos que comparten un mismo significado, o un significado parecido, sus extensiones semánticas son muy distintas y guardan una relación muy distinta entre ellas. En el caso de cada verbo, es posible identificar más de una rama de sentidos que se relacionan entre sí, y su uso en el corpus permite discernir que los cambios de significado suelen ir acompañados de otros cambios gramaticales. Los resultados de este análisis contrastivo permiten señalar algunas de las dificultades que supone para el aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera la flexibilidad semántica de las palabras