Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011

In this article, we argue that multimodal metaphors are grounded in the dynamics of felt experiences. Felt experiences are inherently affective, with immediate sensory qualities and an affective stance. We suggest that as such, they ground the emergence and activation of metaphors. We illustrate this idea with analyzed data from a film and face-to-face conversation. Our consideration of expressive movement in speech, gestures, and feature film does not therefore target the analysis of the speech and gestures of actors. Rather we suggest an approach firmly rooted in film theory, and which considers films as composed of cinematic expressive movements. The basic tenet of our proposal is as follows: seeing cinematic expressive movements trigger the same kind of felt experience in the spectator as a bodily expressive movement that comes along with speech. Expressive movements are held to provide the experiential ‘embodied’ grounds for the construction of metaphors.

The introduction of English as a foreign language in many countries at ever younger ages poses new challenges for teachers, material designers and researchers in terms of finding out and dealing with the needs of such young children when learning a foreign language. This paper focuses on vocabulary learning at early ages, arguing for the inclusion of figurative language in young learners’ English input for two main reasons: firstly, some figurative uses are very frequent in general language and suitable for young learners’ communicative needs and, secondly, research (Piquer-Píriz, 2005) has shown that children as young as 5 years old are able to work out figurative extensions of words whose literal meanings they know, through associative (metonymic) and analogical (metaphoric) reasoning. The specific case of hand is explored, drawing on some of the findings mentioned above, to discuss the potential of cognitive linguistic-inspired approaches in the young learner classroom.

This paper offers an integrated typology for the classification of personifications in discourse, based on existing methods for linguistic metaphor identification such as MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and MIPVU (Steen et al., 2010). The psychological relevance of the proposed typology is explored in an empirical study that examines the recognition of personifications in fiction by non-expert readers. A selection of structural properties of personifications is discussed and predictions are formulated regarding which values of which variables are deemed to boost the recognition of personifications. The results suggest that the different types of personification differ in recognizability and that their recognition may be more strongly determined by inherent properties (such as conventionality) than by external factors (such as the presence of a prime). Though the results cannot be unambiguously interpreted, they do indicate some tendencies in the behaviour of non-expert readers and their perceptions of the forms and functions of personification in fiction.

Although quite a lot is known about the way that non-native speakers of English may interpret and produce metaphors in their second language, we know little about metaphor use in face-to-face conversation between primary and secondary speakers of English. In this article we explore the use of metaphors in two types of conversational data: one elicited in a semi-structured interview format, the other consisting of naturally occurring conversations involving one non-native speaker in dialogue with various native speakers. We found that although native speakers’ use of metaphor was occasionally problematic for the interaction, metaphor also afforded opportunities for topic development in these conversations. The repetition of a word with the potential for metaphoric extension was a particularly valuable strategy used by non-native speakers in these conversations in constructing their coherent contributions to the discourse. In contrast, the use of phraseological metaphors (often the focus of activities aimed at fostering second language learners’ mastery of conventional English metaphors) did not contribute to the joint construction of meanings in these circumstances. We discuss the role of high frequency vocabulary in these conversations and some implications for further research.

This study combines Discourse Dynamics (Cameron, 2007) with Perceptual Simulation Theory (Barsalou, 2007; Gibbs, 2006), to analyze a sample of talk among residents of an urban neighborhood about topics related to community safety and the quality of life in their community. The results demonstrate the role of casual conversation in structuring complex social relationships, and the usefulness of close attention to metaphors, story-telling, and humor. By their use, re-use, and development of metaphors and stories the participants in this conversation express and reinforce the patterns of sociability and mutual watchfulness that contribute to a feeling of safety and comfort in their neighborhood, resolve contradictions inherent in life in a diverse community, and cultivate mutual commitment to maintaining the neighborhood as a pleasant community in which to live and raise children.

The last decade has seen a large number of studies employing metaphor elicitation techniques, especially using ‘X is (like) Y’ format to investigate language teachers’ and learners’ understandings of teaching and/or learning. Although a few recent studies have reported the proportion of unsuccessful answers to this type of task, and identified a number of issues connected with task difficulty, there appears to be little published work that has seriously addressed the validity of the method used. The aims of this paper are therefore to explore the discourse and contexts where failure/difficulty with the metaphor elicitation task occurs, to try and understand what causes the problems and to suggest approaches to resolving them. In so doing, this paper reports on two small-scale metaphor analysis studies that were primarily designed to reduce the incidence of difficulty with ‘X is (like) Y’ metaphor prompts, presenting the perceived reasons for the difficulties and discussing possible solutions by introducing training in the form of four ready-made metaphor related teaching sessions. Essentially, I argue that training both about metaphor and in using it are important, and that thought needs to be given to both the nature and the length of training. The hope is that the present paper can be a first step and will serve to shed light on the ways that can be employed by metaphor researchers to identify and then resolve their methodological problems.