Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Randal Holme

Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Also by Randal Holme ESP IDEAS TALKING TEXTS

Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Randal Holme

© Randal Holme 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1585–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holme, Randal, 1948– Mind, metaphor and language teaching/Randal Holme. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1585–7 1. Language and languages – Study and teaching. 2. Metaphor. 3. Language acquisition. I. Title. P53.H59 2003 418⬘.0071—dc21 2003053638 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Tables and Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

xii

1 The Study of Metaphor Early perspectives The rehabilitation of metaphor The problem of knowing when something is a metaphor or not Metaphor and relevance theory The cognitive view of metaphor Conceptual metaphor: how metaphors share common themes How we shape abstract concepts with the metaphors we use to grasp them The lack of a clear distinction between the metaphorical and the literal Metaphors as a transfer of meaning from one domain to another: mapping and blending How abstract meaning is conceptualised through metaphor and image schema Some of the conceptual metaphors that produce abstract language are culturally-specific and some are universal Grammar as originating in metaphor over time Conclusions 2 Using Figurative Language The language of metaphor Stretching the domain What categories mean What teachers and students can do with their understanding of categories Achieving greater freedom with meaning: describing things as other than themselves Layering v

1 1 3 5 6 9 10 11 14 17 22 24 25 27 28 29 29 30 37 44 49

vi

Contents

Metaphors looking for a meaning Conclusions 3 Teaching the Language and Structure of Metaphor Metaphor and parts-of-speech Metaphors that identify themselves: grammatical metaphor Elliptical similes Marked metaphors Conclusion 4 Allegory and Analogy: Teaching with Extended Metaphors Allegory Analogy Analogues, models and writing instruction Teaching with analogy: conclusions

52 56 59 60 66 78 89 93 98 98 100 109 118

5 Teaching Lexis through Metaphor Bridging the gap between learning theory and language theory Using metaphor to teach abstract meaning Metaphor teaches students about language Using metaphor in the construction of discourse Expressing deductive and inductive arguments Cause-and-effect paths Conclusion

120

6 Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar Phrasal verbs Tense and time Reference Expressing time Conclusions

150 155 166 168 172 178

7 The Metaphor of Learning Linguistic theories of language acquisition There is no reliable way to distinguish acquired language knowledge from learnt language knowledge Generative theories of SLA The modular mind Cognitivist and generative positions Student errors, CBT (cognitive blend theory) and the remodelling of second-language learning

180 182

120 124 126 129 138 142 147

182 184 189 191 193

Contents vii

Towards a blend-structure model of second-language learning Cognitive blend theory (CBT) and language learning How a CBT model can account for language learning A blend-structure model of language learning: understanding and correcting student errors Conclusions

196 197 208 211 219

8 Conclusions Cognitive not social relevance Cultural empathy Affective is effective A kinaesthetic pedagogy: understanding the physical basis of meaning A construction-based pedagogy: exploiting the spatial construction of meaning A participatory pedagogy

221 221 222 223

Bibliography

229

Index

237

224 224 226

List of Tables and Figures Tables 3.1 Proverb matching 3.2 Grammatical metaphor: the subject as a ‘charged head’ 3.3 Grammatical metaphor: a table to help students with nominalised structures

67 76 76

Figures 1.1 An application of Fauconnier and Turner’s 1998 cognitive blend model: the landship and the conceptualisation of the battle tank 2.1 How British supermarkets are rebuilding food categories 2.2 Blackboard diagram: ‘strange and dark place’ as a metonym for ‘path’, ‘wood’ and ‘sunset’ 3.1 Exploring the language of sense perception 3.2 Using grammatical metaphor: actions impacting on actions 3.3 Grammatical metaphor and the creation of textual cohesion 3.4 Blends in the classroom: Koestler’s Buddhist monk 4.1 Analogical structure 4.2 Galileo’s analogy as a blend 4.3 Argument essay structure 4.4 Text frame showing a model research article introduction (text from Mei Yi Lin, 2001: 19) 4.5 Applying genre models as blend structures 4.6 Argument structure modelling: from horizontal to vertical argument 5.1 Teaching abstract lexis through concrete metaphors: ‘substantial’ arguments 5.2 Understanding the origins of words: from plough furrow to dock 5.3 Using mind-maps to show metaphorical themes in text 5.4 Argument structure metaphors: setting ’em up to knock ’em down viii

20 38 49 62 73 77 85 102 102 111 112 113 115 125 128 132 134

List of Tables and Figures ix

5.5 Writing metatext with the metaphors: ‘knowledge is sight’ and ‘the author is a guide to their own text’ 5.6 Explaining empirical thought: some statements need support from the world and some support each other 5.7 Explaining theoretical and empirical thought: self-supporting statements vs statements that seek support in the world 5.8 Metaphor and idiom: the effect of culture on a universal schema 6.1 Model of a construction grammar 6.2 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schema represented by the particle ‘up is dynamic’ 6.3 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is achieved movement’ 6.4 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is more and more sometimes good’ 6.5 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is an end point’ 6.6 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is an end point’ 6.7 Teaching phrasal verbs with the schematisation of the particle ‘up is bringing lost objects to the surface’ 6.8 Teaching the present continuous as an adjective that frames an action 6.9 Teaching the definite article as schemas branching from a prototypical instance of use 6.10 Metaphor showing the indicative nature of the definite article 6.11 The possession schema: mind as a storehouse of continuing actions 7.1 Approach path errors: how errors reflect constraints that are of reducing generality 7.2 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a second-language phonology: step 1 7.3 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a second-language phonology: step 2 7.4 Blend-structure model of language learning showing metalinguistic interference 7.5 Blend-structure model of an XYZ sentence 7.6 Blend-structure model showing a failed category connection

136 144

146 148 153 160 162 163 164 165 165 167 168 171 174 195 202 203 204 205 206

x

List of Tables and Figures

7.7 Blend-structure model showing a failure of basic syntax 7.8 Blend-structure model of language learning: modifying interlanguage with metasyntax 7.9 Blend structure language learning: cueing the wrong register 7.10 Blend structure errors: how the meaning of ‘blood’ governs transitivity 7.11 Blend structure approach to errors: right image schema, wrong category 7.12 Using the event-is-location metaphor to help students construct and use English infinitives 7.13 Image schematic approaches to correction: ‘keep up with’ 7.14 Image schematic approaches to correction: schematising ‘up with’ versus ‘up to’ 8.1 A time-line showing the English tense system

207 208 212 213 215 216 217 218 225

Acknowledgements I would like to extend particular gratitude to Professor Mike Byram for his advice, interest and support during the first phases of this project. I want to acknowledge the help of numerous colleagues and students who have made this experimentation possible and have helped with their insights and comments. I also want to express my gratitude to my mother, Anthea Holme, for her help with the correction of some early drafts. Finally, I would like to express particular thanks and gratitude to my wife, Virgolina, and to my three children, Kim, Amelia and Christopher, for giving me the time to write and compile this book. RANDAL HOLME

xi

Introduction The last few decades have seen an upsurge of research interest in metaphor and figurative language. This interest has also become part of a larger enquiry into the relationship between language and other processes of mind, an enquiry that is producing the field known as cognitive linguistics. This book is very much a product of this new interest and its rapidly expanding literature. However, the book’s primary objective is not to add to that already extensive body of research; my concern here is to explore the relevance of this knowledge for another related area, that of language teaching. In linguistics, or any other area of enquiry, pure and applied knowledge may interrelate in one of three ways: 1 A theoretical enquiry may be triggered by an applied need. 2 Theoretical knowledge may partially engage with the applied from the outset. This engagement may motivate the development of both. 3 A theoretical endeavour may be undertaken without any concern for its potential application. In language teaching, the first case is plain. Teachers want to explain when a grammatical structure is used in English, and this need for a linguistic rule of thumb will trigger a search for the evidence on which that rule should be based. The applied need will thus launch a theoretical enquiry. The second case may be best demonstrated by the example of SFL (systemic functional linguistics). SFL tries to set out how, in a given social context, a particular meaning creates a particular use of language. Communicative teaching engages with this type of analysis because it needs a sense of linguistic form as a response to the type of meaning we want to communicate. The third case highlights how other forms of linguistic enquiry have been almost eager not to engage with language teaching. For example, Generative Linguistics had as its motivation the deduction of the rules by which language is produced; rules are deduced according to a consistent, scientific method. The abstract and symbolic nature of their formulation means that they can have little interest for a student who needs an easy explanation as to why one form will be used and not xii

Introduction xiii

another, yet this has not stopped scholars from asking how generative linguistics should affect their approach to language teaching and learning. Like the search for a generative grammar, the exploration of metaphor was not stimulated by any applied need. Unlike generative grammar, it did not begin as a search for the larger problem of how languages are acquired, produced and understood; it began more as the study of a linguistic conundrum. However, this interest in solving a vexing and peripheral linguistic puzzle has developed into a larger enquiry about how meaning, itself, is constructed. Although occurring outside the frame of pedagogy, research into metaphor has dealt with the relationship between language, cognition and knowledge construction. It has revealed principles in language structure that may also open a window onto the processes through which language is learnt. Some applied linguists have already started to ask how teachers might make use of metaphor studies. This book will carry forward that enquiry; it will look at some of the work already done, then ask how such studies can combine into a wider perspective that will change the way language teachers think about what they do. Chapter 1 will survey the development of the field of metaphor studies. It will be the only chapter without explicit pedagogical relevance. However, it will provide the necessary background for the discussion of applications that will come after. Each of Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 elaborates on a different aspect of metaphor research, asking how this informs language teaching, both from a practical and a theoretical perspective. I will unfold the practical study as a series of pedagogical episodes or narratives of classroom events. In line with qualitative procedure (see for example Silverman, 1985 and 1993), my objective is not to treat the instances described as a basis for generalisation about how language students should be taught or about how they will respond to a given technique; my objective is to recount what occurred when certain techniques were tried out with a class. Teachers should use the narrative as the basis of their own improvisation not as a prescription for how to proceed. In these narratives, I will take on the role that Richards and Lockart (1996: 2) characterise as that of a reflective teacher, recalling the ‘interactions that occur in a classroom and the exploitation of the learning opportunities that these offer’. Chapter 2 looks at metaphor as it appears in language. It asks how far metaphor can be identified by formal linguistic means, and it considers whether metaphor is a form of language use that students can be taught to recognise and produce, either adding to their larger language competence or forming a particular type of competence itself.

xiv Introduction

Chapter 3 will consider how some types of metaphor may be better termed analogies and others allegories. I will show how analogy formation is a vital skill for students and teachers alike, often determining both how teachers communicate knowledge to students, and how students grasp what is communicated. I will also argue that because analogy is central to the way we construct many types of argument, its formation and expression should be taught to students who require higher-level language skills. Chapter 4 will ask whether we might find it easier to identify what metaphor is if we place it beside another type of figurative language use, metonymy. My exploration of metonymy will again show how figures of speech are not some unusual use of language but show how we build conventional or literal meanings in language. Metonymy also reveals a link between culture and the construction of meaning, and such a link has considerable interest for language teachers. Chapter 5 will look more closely at cognitive theories of metaphor. It will discuss how metaphor is the mechanism through which we grasp abstract meaning in language and will ask how this can change the way we teach vocabulary. Chapter 6 will extend the analysis of how metaphor shapes abstract concepts to a discussion of grammatical meaning. It will ask how far the cognitive analysis of grammar can impact upon the classroom. Chapter 7 will depart from the pattern of the previous five chapters to launch a wider discussion about how cognitive theories of language and metaphor can change the way we look at theories of second language acquisition and learning. It will do this first with a theoretical discussion that will look for support in some of the errors that students produce. Chapter 8 will draw wider conclusions about how our understanding of metaphor should change the way we perceive language-teaching methodology. It will set out the impact of this research as requiring a methodology that puts cognitive before social relevance, demands cultural empathy, is affective, kinaesthetic and visual while encouraging a pedagogical style that is participatory rather than facilitative.

1 The Study of Metaphor

Early perspectives Although current scholarly interest in metaphor dates largely from the late 1970s, it would be wrong to imagine that metaphor excited negligible concern prior to this. Metaphor became part of the enquiry into how we use language to express thought and emotion almost at the moment that the enquiry began. Aristotle (1927) is now cited as the originator of the comparative theory of metaphor, holding that a metaphor is a comparison between two terms that is made in order to explore the nature of one (Gibbs, 1994). Thus, to say that ‘love is a rose’ is to compare an emotion, ‘love’, to a flower possessed of a seductive scent and form that is protected by thorns. ‘Love’ can thus be expressed as beautiful, seductive and dangerous by being compared to a flower that has the same properties. Aristotle also touches upon the capacity of metaphor to name what is not named, or to serve the ‘human urge’ ‘to articulate what is as yet unarticulated’ (Cooper, 1993: 40). He discusses how the sun ‘casting forth its rays’ has no name, unlike ‘casting forth of seed’ which is called sowing, hence we may come to speak of the sun ‘sowing its flames’ (Derrida, 1972). Aristotle therefore identified two key attributes of metaphor: 1 The transformation of a conventional meaning through its comparison to something else. 2 The use of a transformed meaning to represent a phenomenon which may be otherwise unnamed (Ricoeur, 1975: 104). Aristotle also expressed the interest of classical rhetoricians in metaphor as a device that persuades and moves an audience. In the Western 1

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Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

rhetorical tradition, metaphor was also seen as able to help a speaker to remember the order of their subject matter, as a mnemonic in other words. To express the nature of one thing through that of another was to make it memorable. Thus a speech could be seen as a building with different rooms storing different topics while the speech-maker imagined themselves opening one door after another in order to reveal a room’s contents (Yates, 1984). The speech-maker creates a series of metaphors. The speech is a building, and each point made represents the contents of a room. Since the seventeenth century and the philosopher Renee Descartes, the deductive method has become central to Western thought. Accordingly, an argument is valid when a statement follows logically from the one that has preceded it. Thus if the first statement of an argument is true, all others will be true, provided that each can be deduced from the one before. This Cartesian tradition found metaphor a difficult or even dangerous topic. Cartesian thought assumes that the premise of an argument can fix the meaning of words in the way that the value of a mathematical symbol, x, can be assigned an unchangeable value, as x ⫽ 2 for example. Therefore in a very simple equation x ⫹ y ⫽ 3 we can determine the value of y as long as we assign a value to x. However, if the value of x changes from 2 to 3, for example, then the value of y will also change. Equally, if we say that x might be 2 or it might be 3, then we can say the same thing about y. One insecure value makes our larger argument insecure. Metaphor introduces exactly this type of insecurity. It raises the possibility that words can suddenly acquire new meanings, calling into question an argument which is founded on meanings that were thought to be fixed. The Empirical tradition that arose in England slightly later also found metaphor difficult. Empiricism tries to verify its arguments through what happens in the world. It therefore needs a language that represents things as they are and not as one mind reports them to be. Metaphor threatens the possibility of such a language with the involuntary interference of the mind that argues. It suggests that a given event can be accorded different interpretations by different figures of speech. It disrupts the possibility of a univocal discourse where things render themselves into words as single unmediated meanings. The German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) recognised how our use of language was often metaphorical. Metaphor was difficult to avoid and its ubiquity made even common meanings insecure and philosophical argument difficult. Hegel therefore distinguished between a type of metaphor whose meaning was fixed and one which would introduce something new and could corrupt philosophical discourse. The first

The Study of Metaphor 3

kind was dead metaphor. An example of a dead metaphor would be the use of the word ‘ruin’ in ‘she ruined my career’. Ruins are collapsed buildings. A career cannot be reduced to a smashed dwelling so ‘ruined my career’ is metaphorical. Yet we use this expression so often that we do not recognise it as unusual and might not normally class it as a metaphor. Hegel argued that a dead metaphor has its meaning secured by the passage of history (Cooper, 1986). Live metaphor declares its unusual and often poetic nature as when we say ‘Juliet is the sun’ while knowing she cannot be. A more recent term for some dead metaphors is lexicalised metaphor. By this we mean that the metaphorical meaning has become an established feature of the lexicon, as when we talk about ‘emotional bonds’ and, do not for a moment think we mean cords. The process is called lexicalisation.

The rehabilitation of metaphor In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards (1936), made one of the twentieth century’s first significant studies of metaphor. Richards’ contribution was to see metaphor as an ‘omniscient principle of language’ rather than as a marginal construct that threatened the integrity of logical argument (ibid.: 92). He saw metaphor as constructed out of a tension between two terms, the tenor and the vehicle. In a metaphor such as the following: 1

Life is a game of chess.

‘life’ is the tenor, or what the metaphor is primarily about, and ‘a game of chess’ is the vehicle, or the term that carries metaphor’s descriptive force. The metaphor arises from the tension between the differences in the meanings of these two parts. Thus the tenor, ‘life’, has a quite different meaning to the vehicle, a ‘chess-game’. This difference of meaning is what allows metaphor to draw attention to the hidden attributes of the terms with which it deals. Richards’ (1936) views on the importance of metaphor were largely ignored by his contemporaries, and the mistrust of formal philosophers continued to influence even those who took an interest in the topic. Black (1962, 1993) considered that metaphor was central to human selfexpression but that it was nonetheless a departure from normal language use. Black argued that a metaphor such as 1, above, is different from a literal statement because the vehicle, ‘a chess game’, is not the phenomenon that it is said to be. Chess is no longer a game. It describes our existence.

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Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Black’s larger and more enduring contribution was the interactional theory of metaphor (1962). This theory sees a metaphor as being about two subjects: ‘a primary’ and ‘a secondary’ one. The adoption of the idea of two subjects raises the key point that both parts of the metaphor contribute to the kind of meaning that is created. According to a traditional analysis we might say that in Shakespeare’s ‘Beauty’s a flower’, the vehicle, ‘a flower’, is the metaphor and ‘beauty’ means ‘beauty’. But, according to Black, the two subjects, ‘beauty’ and ‘flower’ interact in order to extract from each other the compatible meanings on which the metaphor is based. We can see this more clearly if we examine the metaphor in 2: 2

Women are angels wooing. (Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida)

Basically, both the terms, ‘angels’ and ‘women who are being wooed’ carry what Aristotle called endoxa, or ‘current opinions’ shared by the speech community as to the possible meanings of a given term (Black, 1993: 28). For example, no speech community at any time has conceived of women in courtship as being winged creatures who may literally take flight. However, suitors traditionally revere the women they woo. As sacred beings, angels are also revered, at least according to the endoxa of the Christian, Muslim and Judaic speech communities. Therefore women wooing can be angels, but they cannot be everything an angel is. A primary subject, ‘women wooing’ fails to extract a key aspect of the secondary one, ‘angels as winged beings’ and leaves others, ‘reverence and beauty’. Therefore we can conclude that Shakespeare intends that when women are being courted, men treat them as objects of great beauty and reverence. Example 2 also shows up some of the difficulties of Black’s analysis. ‘Women wooing’ cancels out such features as ‘winged and immortal’ because ‘women wooing’ cannot be these things and leaves ‘objects of reverence’. Yet in order to do this, we must already know what ‘women wooing’ are. Interactional theory forces the conclusion that metaphors are finally uninformative, drawing our attention to what we already know. Black’s (1993) other contribution lies in his argument that the primary and secondary subjects achieve an isomorphic relationship within the frame of their basic dissimilarity. To understand what is meant by an isomorphic relationship, we should consider how ‘temperature’ and ‘the mercury in a thermometer’ affect each other. ‘Temperature’ and ‘mercury’ are conceptually different; temperature is abstract and mercury a physical entity or a metal. Yet the behaviour of one clearly reflects the behaviour of the

The Study of Metaphor 5

other. When the temperature rises by a given amount, the mercury will expand by a given amount. Temperature and mercury change in lockstep. Ricoeur (1975) saw a metaphor as aspiring to an isomorphic relationship between its topic and vehicle. ‘Mercury is heat’ or ‘heat mercury’ because beneath their fundamental difference, ‘heat’ and ‘mercury’ achieve a relationship of near perfect symmetry. In Shakespeare’s ‘beauty is a flower’, ‘beauty’ and ‘a flower’ retain their differences yet are fated to affect each other, as heat does mercury. The wilting of the flower is the loss of beauty. The short-lived nature of the flower is the shortlived nature of beauty.

The problem of knowing when something is a metaphor or not The work of Richards, Black, Ricoeur and the linguist, Jakobson (1971), though different in nature, contributed to a growing awareness of the importance of metaphor as a mechanism of meaning-construction in language. Both Ricoeur and Derrida reject the possibility of language being a univocal system where each word is endowed with a clear, distinct and unambiguous meaning that is derived from the world. For Derrida (1972) the very language of rational philosophy was built out of metaphor, ‘foundation is a metaphor, concept is a metaphor, theory is a metaphor and there is no metametaphor for them’. For Derrida, the consequence is that language constructs the world in which we operate. Its metaphors and not the world itself build the categories in which we place phenomena. For formal linguistics and philosophers such a conclusion is unacceptable. A language that creates meanings out of itself is not susceptible to logical enquiry because there is no firm concept of reality against which the value of those meanings can be assessed. Although working from a quite contrary perspective, formal linguists such as Davidson (1979), Rorty (1989) or Sadock (1993) treated metaphor as a suspect topic because they understood how it could put language outside the bounds of logical enquiry in very much the way that Derrida had outlined. Formal approaches to semantics were underpinned by Tarski’s (1956) concept of a truth-condition where something is true if and only if it is true. At first sight this may seem circuitous, but when we apply this analysis we can see how it provides us with a way to determine the types of meaning we are dealing with. Thus ‘a house is white, if and only if a house is white’. The statement is validated by whether it accords with the world to which it refers. Thus, ‘a house is white’ constitutes a literal

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Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

statement if it is ‘white’ but might start to deviate from the same if it were actually a pale grey. ‘White’ would then be extended towards ‘grey’, making a metaphorical reference to a colour. Metaphorical meaning is a violation of a term’s truth conditions and metaphor suggests a language of semantic flux where a statement cannot be validated by the world to which it refers. Yet a truth-conditional analysis is not as problem-free as it first appears. The philosopher John Searle points out how in the case of the two sentences, 3 and 4, below, we know immediately the truth conditions of 3 but would have considerable difficulty with 4. 3 4 5

The fly is on the ceiling. The cat is on the ceiling. (Searle, 1993: 86) Sam is a pig. (Searle, 1993: 105)

Example 4 reveals how a sentence that meets a truth-condition test is not always easy to understand, whereas one such as 5, which fails a truth-condition test, can be immediately comprehensible. Our ability to understand a statement depends upon how easily we can apply our background knowledge to it, not upon its truth conditions. In the case of a metaphor such as sentence 5, above, we know immediately that what Searle calls the sentence meaning and the utterance meaning do not coincide, ‘Sam’ is a human, not the animal he is asserted to be. Example 4 also shows that the need to go outside a normal factual frame of reference in order to find a meaning is not just peculiar to metaphor. The ‘cat’ in 4 may actually be on the ceiling because a cat hater has splattered it over the plasterwork. We just have to work harder and through a longer chain of inferences to understand that. In 5, we know that Sam is a human being not an animal in the way we know that cats do not normally adhere to ceilings. Just as we have to search our background knowledge in order to grasp the adhesive properties of a splattered cat so do we to evoke the folk wisdom about pigs when we realise that Sam is actually human. Background knowledge plays a crucial role in our full understanding of even literal utterances. Statements are not immediately comprehensible because they are in accord with their truth conditions and, like 5 (Sam is a pig), not immediately meaningless because they violate them.

Metaphor and relevance theory A formal linguist proceeds on the assumption that we can understand what someone else says because we use the same rules to interpret and

The Study of Metaphor 7

produce a given utterance as the speaker. These rules restrict what we can do with language. If they did not, we would make incomprehensible statements. The problem with metaphor is that it suggests that meanings can change in new and unpredictable ways. An obvious way to move forward from this is to accept that state of affairs and to regard metaphor as belonging to a territory that the linguist Noam Chomsky (1985) would call epiphenomenal. Chomsky’s famous early distinction was between our knowledge of the rules with which we produce language, our competence, and the language that is produced, our performance. ‘Performance’ is a linguistic epiphenomenon, or an ethereal product of the knowable and phenomenal nature of competence. To regard metaphor as an epiphenomenon means that we should treat it as a violation of the semantics of natural language because it is outside the core competence to which these belong. This means that we are moving our analysis of metaphor into the area of language use. For Chomsky, the question of how we use language is not worth studying because we simply cannot predict the number and type of contexts in which that use will occur. For Grice (1975), the principles that govern our use of language could be formulated. He therefore deduced the co-operative maxims that allow meaningful communication between individuals. Two central co-operative maxims are truthfulness and relevance. Metaphor poses an immediate problem for the principle of truthfulness because a statement such as ‘beauty is a flower’ is patently false. ‘Beauty’ is not a flower, it is a condition that people ascribe to each other and to things in the world. Because the statement is false, we then ask why we are using the falsehood. In other words, we ‘seek, a figurative, co-operative intent behind the utterance’ (Sadock, 1993: 43). Our search for co-operative intent invokes another Gricean maxim, that of relevance. In the sentence, ‘Sam is a pig’, we reject the idea that Sam is really a snorting and inarticulate quadruped because that meaning is not relevant to the idea we manifestly want to convey or to the context in which the communication takes place. According to Sperber and Wilson (1985 and 1986), the Gricean maxim of relevance should be perceived not just as one of the several principles that allow meaningful communication to occur, but as a theory of mind. Our processes of thought require that we heed the points that are relevant to us. In forming or interpreting an utterance, we first try to make the utterance concur with ‘the assumptions’ that we hold about it (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 2). A second stage is to search the context for features that will be relevant to the assumption. Thus, in an interpretation

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Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

of the metaphor, ‘women are angels wooing’, we know that ‘women wooing’ are not ‘angels’. The statement violates our first assumption about wooing women and angels. We look, therefore, in the context of angels for the implicatures that are most relevant to the information we are trying to convey; for example, virtue and sanctity. Goatly (1997: 142–3) has developed one of the most elaborate views of metaphor according to the principle of relevance. He treats the distinction between literal and metaphorical language as existing on a cline. The point where we find ourselves between the strictly literal and the demonstrably figurative depends on the number of implicatures through which we have to work in order to discover the actual meaning. In an example such as ‘Sam is a pig’, the number will be small. This would be because ‘pig’ has almost acquired the secondary meaning of ‘greedy, dirty and slovenly’. In a case such as that of 6, below, it is clear that the number of implicatures would be very great and the issue of relevance would never be totally resolved, making this highly metaphorical. 6

Eternity is a spider. (cited in Cooper, 1986)

Arguably, 6 triggers a search through one implicature after another, with the mind never being able to determine the most relevant then to rest there. Metaphor and relevance theory: cognitive criticisms The relevance interpretation of metaphor assumes that we begin by assuming a literal meaning. When the literal interpretation produces something ridiculous, we move on to a figurative one. A relevance view would hold that 7 is understood first as 8 and only secondarily as 9 because the literal meaning of ‘can’ refers to our ability to do something: 7 8 9

Can’t you be friendly to other people? Are you unable to be friendly to other people? Please be friendly to other people. (Gibbs, 1994)

Gibbs (1982, 1983) argued that if relevance theory was true, processing a metaphorical meaning such as 9 from an utterance such as 7 would mean we had first to pass through 8. Obtaining meaning 9 would therefore need greater cognitive effort and thus more time. Gibbs conducted a series of reaction-time tests where subjects were given two different contexts for a sentence such as 8. The first suggested the meaning

The Study of Metaphor 9

should be construed literally, the second, figuratively. Thus, a literal context was suggested where a psychiatrist implied that their patient had a condition where they could not be friendly. A non-literal context was given as one where an adult was trying to correct the behaviour of a quarrelsome child. The fact that under experimental conditions, subjects took longer to compute the literal meaning than the figurative was taken as evidence against the adoption of a relevance view of metaphor processing (Gibbs, 1994).

The cognitive view of metaphor Gibbs’ conclusion that we can compute the meaning of non-literal language just as quickly as the literal was used to support a cognitive or image-schematic view of metaphor processing. This cognitive view remains the basis for the largest research endeavour in the field of metaphor and has amounted to a reorientation of how we treat language, the relationship between language and thought, and the nature of thought itself. The development of a cognitive approach to metaphor can be considered as having the following strands: 1 The reduction of metaphors as they occur in language to a finite set of common metaphors that are treated as conceptual or formative of the meanings with which language must work. 2 A view that we depend on metaphors in order to understand abstract ideas. The way we treat a topic in any form of scientific or philosophical enquiry is skewed by the metaphors that we use to describe it. 3 The observation that much language understood as literal is in fact highly metaphorical and that finally the literal/metaphorical distinction does not really exist in a definitive sense. 4 The description of metaphors as a transfer of meaning from one domain to another in a process known as mapping or as the integration of two meanings in a process known as blending. 5 The understanding that abstract language is entirely metaphorical in origin and can largely be reduced to a set of mappings that derive from our experience of our bodies and of the body’s interaction with the world. 6 The view that some abstract language is a product of culturally specific conceptual metaphors and that some is a product of universal ones. 7 The observation that like other expressions of abstract thought, the grammar of language has been structured by metaphors derived from an awareness of ourselves as embodied creatures. Understanding

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grammar means understanding how it has thus evolved by metaphor over time. I will now explore each of these points in turn.

Conceptual metaphor: how metaphors share common themes Reddy (1993) observed how the vehicles of the metaphorical expressions that we need to talk about a given idea may share the same theme. Since Aristotle, a common observation in literary criticism was how poetic metaphors were often used in chains that were linked by a common underlying theme. We can see this in 10, from Shakespeare’s Othello: 10

Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt, And very sea mark of my utmost sail. Do you go back dismay’d? ‘tis a lost fear: Man but a rush against Othello’s breast And he retires. Where should Othello go?

The hero has realised that he must kill himself; he talks about his death as his ‘journey’s end’. He develops this idea in the second line. His life is now one of the ocean voyages that made him famous; the journey of his life has reached its last shore. In the third line the theme changes. Because he is wielding a weapon and has a fierce reputation, others in the room are moving back from him. He tells them that their fear is groundless; he will simply retreat if attacked. Then he reflects how there is no place for him to retreat to unless it is to death. The metaphor of a journey and life as a movement is taken up differently within an image of warfare, with the idea of advance, or ‘the rush’ and retreat. Thus the same theme links the different images even though the writer exploits it in different ways through other metaphorical layers, the ocean voyage or the battlefield manoeuvre. Reddy’s contribution was to show how such metaphorical themes structure our everyday use of language. In his analysis of ‘communication’, he showed how it is often conceived as a ‘conduit’. We discuss communication as opening or using a channel as in ‘getting through, coming across, putting across’ or ‘transfer’ as in ‘language transfer’ (ibid.: 189–97). Equally, the message itself is perceived as the container that is dispatched along the conduit as when we ‘unpack a statement’ or ‘search in text for a message’. The implications of this discovery were held to be

The Study of Metaphor 11

widespread, touching upon, for example, the way we conceptualised and thus critically approached a communicative package such as a text (ibid.: 179–80). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) extended Reddy’s analysis by exploring a series of metaphors through which we conceptualise abstract experience. Thus ‘business’ and ‘argument’ are talked about as if they were ‘warfare’. Equally, our visual field is a ‘container’ reflecting our sense of ourselves as creatures contained by our bodies, with ‘things coming into view’ or ‘passing out of sight’. ‘Time’ has a complicated conceptualisation that begins with the core metaphors ‘time is space’ or ‘time is a resource’. Thinking of time as if it were space means that we perceive it as the ground we have to cover as in ‘there is a long time to go’. It may be the point we occupy as in ‘be here at seven’, or are moving towards and may pass as in ‘he got there after seven’. Alternatively, time is itself the object moving in space as in ‘time goes by’. ‘Time is space’, ‘business is war’ and ‘the visual field is a container’ are examples of conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors are not examples of a use of language in text but an instance of how we conceptualise or grasp an abstract topic such as ‘love’ or ‘time’. The conceptualisation will have different manifestations in text. Thus, we often think of our lives as if they were a journey (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), perhaps because we see time as a trajectory or path through space and our lives as moving along the path of time. In example 10, we can see how Shakespeare made unconscious use of the conceptual metaphor ‘life is a journey’ to describe death as ‘that journey’s end’, ‘a butt’ (an end) or a ‘sea mark’ (a final point in an ocean voyage). In a more ordinary context, we can see how a conceptual metaphor, ‘time is an object moving in space’, can shape the way we talk about time. So we say ‘time is moving slowly’, ‘time goes by’, ‘the minutes go slowly’, or ‘life passes too fast’. The metaphor ‘time is a resource’ gives us such expressions as ‘use your time wisely’ or ‘we’re almost out of time’. Conceptual metaphors represent how we grasp and structure our reality. They establish the principles that guide our metaphor-making in language or in some other medium.

How we shape abstract concepts with the metaphors we use to grasp them One of the more radical conclusions that Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1999) drew from Reddy’s observation was that we cannot really think about an abstract idea such as ‘time’ without conceptualising it through

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one of the metaphors that we use to describe it in language. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) invite their reader to engage in a thought experiment where they try to think of time as time. Invariably people will fail. When I asked students to do this, they imagined clocks or lines through space but never saw time itself. A tempting conclusion would be that we create time with the metaphors we use to describe it. But this would undermine all hope of objective enquiry. It would suggest, for example, that the validity of any scientific experiment involving the measurement of time was simply dependent on the metaphor through which time was brought into existence at a given instant. The experiment would be like a poem. It would depend on how we felt about the power of the metaphors with which time was described. This was the conclusion of postmodernist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. A more plausible argument is that time is discovered or conceptualised by the metaphors that we use to describe it. Conceptualisation suggests the act of bringing something within our cognitive grasp, or of giving it a form that our minds can know and make use of. We can talk of other sense experiences with varying degrees of directness. Light is bright or dark. Touch is rough or smooth and taste sweet or sour. But, although we can talk of sound as loud, we use the language of touch to describe the opposite and say ‘soft’. ‘Soft’ is a synaesthetic metaphor that uses one type of sense perception to describe another. Derrida (1972), pointed out that our sense of smell is totally dependent on synaesthetic metaphor. Smell is ‘bitter’, ‘sweet’, ‘oppressive’ or ‘sharp’. When identified with the processes that produce it, smell is ‘fetid’, ‘rotten’, ‘acrid’, ‘flowery’ or ‘burnt’. But smell is never smell. Although experienced as itself, it can only be conceptualised as something else. The observations of Reddy (1993) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have triggered a large body of research into the links between metaphor and the manner in which a given topic or area of enquiry is conceptualised. For example, our understanding of medicine, illness and health can be made clearer when we understand the types of metaphor through which such topics are grasped. In most studied languages, we can say that the dominance of visual perception in the human sensory system leads us to conceptualise understanding as seeing. Belleza (1992) looked at how this conceptualisation of the mind as an eye and the concomitant metaphor of ‘sight as understanding’ has structured the mnemonics of ‘professional memorisers’. Block has brought the issue closer to English language teaching by looking at the metaphors through which we grasp the teaching and

The Study of Metaphor 13

learning task (1992), or in which we frame the issue of second-language acquisition (1999). Low (1999) has asked whether we can be said to conceptualise the text as a person in metatextual commentaries that treat discourse as an organ capable of pronouncing upon itself, as in the phrase ‘this paper thinks’. The areas of sickness and medicine have triggered a great deal of related interest. Haraway (1989) looked at the rhetoric of war, defence and military technology that can be found in popular discourse on the immune system. Martin (1990) conducted a similar study of contemporary popular texts that found the dominant conceptualisation of the body as a nation state. Popular medical discourse has not developed far beyond the more expert metaphors of the nineteenth century, which according to Barbera (1993) also conceptualised the body as a nation in conflict. Sontag (1991) explored how the sick are treated according to the way in which illness is conceptualised through metaphors of warfare. Lupton (1994) dealt with the representation of illness with metaphor as a more general study of how the disease and the body are treated in Western culture. Economics, business and politics have also received significant treatment. Morgan (1997) has put forward a set of different conceptual metaphors through which managers can reexamine their company structure in order to determine the type of system they operate. For example, company structures can be organic or mechanistic. More interesting is Morgan’s argument that an understanding of the structure as a given metaphor can help to release a manager’s thinking from the entailments that the metaphors impose. Metaphor fashions our approach to the problems posed by reality, society, politics or any domain of human interest. The metaphors with which we think and talk about things will exert some control over the way that those things are seen and will therefore affect the decisions that we make about them (see for example Lakoff, 1992). Lakoff (1992) wrote how the metaphors with which Western politicians conceptualised the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait made it extremely difficult to make balanced assessment of the event. The metaphor ‘Saddam Hussein is a demon’ made it impossible to deal with him as leader who might negotiate to avoid war. Metaphor begins as an instinctive method of finding and naming concepts that are crucial to how we structure reality, such as reason or time, but it ends as a way to exert conscious and unconscious control over those structures in order to foster or protect a given social order. How we think about a topic is partly a product of the metaphors

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through which it is conceptualised. Equally, looking at something from a new direction can mean changing the metaphors we use to understand it.

The lack of a clear distinction between the metaphorical and the literal A very famous Japanese poem can roughly be translated as follows: 11

The frog jumped into the pond. (cited in Cooper, 1986)

This poem raises a number of points about metaphor. The first point is that our truth-conditional analysis would not tell us anything about whether this statement was metaphorical. We could say that ‘the frog jumped into a pond, if, and only if, a frog jumped into a pond’; we could then assert that Basho, the poet, observed a frog to do just that, therefore the statement is literal; yet, one must ask why the poet wrote down this famous observation and why it has become something of a cultural icon. The fact that the observation constitutes a poem of a particular kind indicates that it aspires to significance beyond the trivial event described. A further problem is that the event may be worthy of attention not because it is to be interpreted metaphorically but because our attention has been drawn to it. The event is not significant on account of its evocation of non-literal meanings but because it is framed for contemplation. Our discovery of metaphor within it may be more a function of our thoughts than of the poet’s. This means that the text does not really have a secure metaphorical meaning. I could discuss the echoic sense of a frog jumping into a still pond, of a depth that cannot be plumbed. Yet this is sheer speculation, albeit of the kind that helps to maintain the discipline of literary criticism. A problem for a truthconditional analysis of metaphor is that this poem both maintains and violates its truth conditions at the same time. It is literal or metaphorical according to how it is read. Clearly the task of finding a difference between literal and metaphorical language is an area of deep confusion. One solution is to suggest that we can have things both ways (Elgin, 1983). For example, we could apply a truth-conditional analysis to the metaphorically extended meanings of this poem. Thus at the literal level we can hold that ‘the frog jumped into the pond, if and only if the frog jumped into the pond’. On a metaphorical plain we can say ‘my thoughts vanished in a dark, quiescent void’, if and only if the frog was my thoughts, the pond a void and my thoughts did that. The problem now is that the precision of the truth-conditional analysis is undermined. It tells

The Study of Metaphor 15

us nothing because the words we use can mean anything and will mean anything provided they match some event in the world. We discussed how the philosopher, Hegel, made a distinction between live and dead metaphor. Dead metaphors were the metaphorical extensions of words that had become part of the normal way we use language. When we say ‘the time passes slowly’ we conceive of time as a moving object in space. Yet we do not hesitate over this phrase or wonder over its unusual and decorous use of language. It becomes clear, therefore, that knowing whether a metaphor is alive or has died and become a literal feature of the language is partly a question of deciding how noticeable it is. Live metaphors use words in a manner that we still recognise as deviant or strange, but there are many marginal cases. For example, a word such as ‘pig’ can be lexicalised as ‘slovenly and dirty’ but still retains its original, animal meaning with a force that makes us recognise we are using the word in a way that although common is nonetheless deviant. Idioms are another example of how a metaphor builds a new meaning but does not die in the sense of becoming unnoticed. For example, when we say ‘I smell a red herring’, we indicate that we are being distracted from talking about an important topic. The idiom is based on what is now opaque metaphor, ‘distractive topics are red herrings’. The metaphor is opaque because it refers to a long forgotten practice, that of using rotten fish to distract bloodhounds from a scent (Goatly, 1997). But we do not understand the idiom in the way we might a metaphor because we have no knowledge about this practice of distracting hounds. Just as we know that ‘-m-u-d’ means ‘mud’, so we know that ‘red herring’ means a ‘distraction from a chosen objective’. However, because we also retain the idea that herrings are fish, we retain the idea that this meaning is bizarre. Other idioms such as when we say somebody is ‘boiling with rage’ are immediately transparent. They may also be common enough for them to be understood as if they are part of the normal lexicon. There are two points here. The first is that metaphor is the product of a central and ubiquitous thought process. The second is that the common nature of that thought process means that language is strewn with metaphors. These metaphors are occasionally new. Sometimes, like ‘boiling with rage’, they are repeated, interpretable but still strange. Sometimes, like ‘a red herring’, they are repeated, opaque but known in the way other words are known. Sometimes, like ‘time’s up’, they are a common part of the language and may often escape notice. The category into which we put a metaphor may depend on many difficult factors. A metaphor may retain its strangeness because of the way

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the meaning is stretched, as with ‘red herring’. As is also the case with this idiom, the metaphor may be opaque because it was based upon vanished practices and customs. It may vanish into the language because its new meaning is somehow more useful than the old; it may retain two meanings that are closely related as in ‘pursue a thief’ and ‘pursue a goal’; it may be new but be taken up so rapidly that it loses its novelty almost overnight like ‘target’ as a verb in ‘target an achievement’. The issue of whether a metaphor is alive, dying or dead must finally be down to the judgement of a community of language speakers at any one time (Elgin, 1983). There is no way that we can stand outside time then point into the repository of creativity that is language and say this expression is different enough to be alive and this is so common it is dead. Finally, what is interesting is not the state of the metaphor or of our uptake of it, but the ubiquity of the cognitive process it represents. This is not to say that we should have no interest in poetic or artistic metaphor, rather that we should be wary of treating metaphor as uncommon except in the nature of the concepts it brings together. The startling nature of a good poetic metaphor must be regarded as the uncommon manifestation of a common cognitive process. Poetic metaphors are like guide-posts that reveal the deeper track of meaning-creation which lies beneath language. We should also be wary of suggesting that metaphor is confined to language. Visual metaphor is common in painting and cinema. For example, the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century painter, Francisco Goya, etched a man and woman engaged in a vain and elaborate courtship then parodied their postures with a sketch of two dogs eyeing each other wantonly at their feet. The fact that metaphor can take a verbal or visual form should reinforce our belief that it is the expression of a sub-linguistic, cognitive process. It is this process which should merit out attention. Let us consider two expressions ‘Juliet is the sun’ and ‘her performance was dazzling’. The first comes through clearly as a metaphor even though it is well-known and has been much discussed. The second may escape our attention. It almost seems like a common use of language. Yet this distinction is relatively uninteresting. What is more important is how both metaphors exploit the same conceptual metaphor. This might be framed as ‘beauty and excellence are brightness’. We need no longer worry about whether one metaphor is dead or not. Our concern is with the property of mind, or the conceptualisation by which these metaphors are produced. If this conceptualisation continues producing metaphors where ‘beauty’ and ‘splendour’ are characterised as ‘brightness’ or ‘light’, then we can assume that the conceptualisation is very

The Study of Metaphor 17

much alive even if some of its products have entered into the language as literal expressions.

Metaphors as a transfer of meaning from one domain to another: mapping and blending It should be clear that a cognitive approach to metaphor means looking beyond what simply happens in language towards how we shape meanings. Our interest is in how the nature of meaning shapes the nature of language. Therefore a cognitive analysis of metaphor will be based upon categorising and describing meanings rather than terms. Semantic field analysis examines the wider field of meaning in which a given term operates. For example, if we were to study ‘the word iron, we would also look at toasters, vacuum cleaners, and other items within the household tools domain’ (Hatch and Brown, 1995: 33). Cognitive linguists have also adopted this idea of a domain of meaning and perhaps extended it to cover other attributes. Thus, irons have the function of smoothing creases in cloth. They now operate with electricity and even connote types of domestic servitude. If it includes such associations, the domain of an iron or any given word can be treated as very large. It also overlaps the domains of other words. In analysing metaphor and analogy, cognitive linguists (for example Gibbs, 1994; Fauconnier, 1997; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) have used the terms source domain and target domain to explore the wider meanings that metaphors create, and which we use to extend meanings into metaphors. Thus, in the metaphor, ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘the sun’ operates in the domain of where we see it as situated: the sky. ‘The sun’ also operates in the domain of its attributes: warmth, brightness, a source of light and of life. For now, my key point concerns the role of domains in the construction of a metaphor. In ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘the sun’ is referred to as the source domain while ‘Juliet’ is considered the target domain. In order to make the connection between the source domain and the target domain, another term, map, is used. Mapping means a transfer of meaning from one domain to another domain (Fauconnier, 1997). According to such terminology, a metaphor, as it occurs in text, represents a transfer of meaning from a source domain onto a target domain. I will now look more closely at the example, ‘Juliet is the sun’, to make this clear. The source domain for the first sentence is ‘the sun’. As said, the domain of ‘sun’ includes the attributes of giving light to the world, of brightness and hence, perhaps, beauty. When the sun is mapped onto Juliet, she will have some of its attributes.

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Juliet therefore has the ability to light up the world. Thus, the source domain of the sun maps onto the target domain of Juliet, and a metaphor is created. Mapping presupposes a prior projection of concepts into a mental space where the operation can occur (Fauconnier, 1997). A projection into a mental space means that the integrity of the concept can be both retained at its point of origin and restructured as a consequence of its being mapped onto something else in another location. We can see how this works in the metaphor, ‘beauty is a flower’. ‘A flower’ is held in the conceptual space normally reserved for it and remains a phenomenon through which plants can seed themselves. At the same time, ‘flower’ is projected into another mental space where it can temporarily become a category through which ‘beauty’ is seen. Mapping may not be fully adequate to describe the metaphor process, however. Metaphor may often be better characterised as the merging of one meaning into another. Aristotle observes that ‘sow’ in ‘the sun sowing its flames’ is no longer a reference to the scattering of corn seed but has instead a new and very specific meaning, one which describes how we see the sun at a particular time but nothing else. A theory of mental spaces allows ‘sow’ to retain its conventional meaning whilst being projected into a new space where it is mapped upon our experience of the sun. In this new space the sun takes on some of the characteristics of the sower of seeds and the sower takes on some of the characteristics of the sun. The new space therefore permits a blend of concepts (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998). A cognitive blend suggests that the identities of the blended domains are compromised or lost as they are projected into a mental space where they can become part of something new. Thus, in ‘beauty is a flower’, ‘beauty’ and ‘flower’ are blended into a hybrid concept, something scented and ethereal but colourful, fertile and attractive. In order to make this clear, it might be worth considering another example that also implicates metaphor formation still more deeply in creativity and invention. My example concerns a process of metaphor-induced invention that occurred during the First World War of 1914–18. The major military problem confronting both sides during the First World War was mobility. The invention of high-explosive shells, barbed wire and the machine gun, meant that troops could not be moved forward or even positioned for an attack in the open without risking annihilation. These three inventions were impediments to movement and could not easily be used to promote mobility, by giving close support to infantry. Britain had traditionally eschewed the large continental armies

The Study of Metaphor 19

of the other European powers in favour of a small professional force whose primary duty had been to guard its enormous overseas empire. British power rested on maritime supremacy. A feature of a warship, whether it was steam or sail powered, was its capacity for the relatively unimpeded manoeuvre of a huge weight in firepower. The First World War frustrated Britain’s strategic impulse because their military could not bring this manoeuvrable firepower to bear. Counterfactual statements are typically prefaced by ‘if/if only’. They invoke a world that is not regulated by the same facts as our own and where their statement becomes one of possibility. Counterfactuals actually suggest a kind of metaphor. When we say ‘if I were the sun’ we are suggesting a metaphor ‘I am the sun’. One can speculate that the strategic impasse of the British in the first two years of the First World War would have been: ‘if only artillery could be moved as if mounted on ships’ or: ‘if only the fields of Flanders were an ocean’. Implicit in such counterfactual thinking is the metaphor ‘the land becomes the sea’. Interestingly, it was not the British army that researched a solution to the stalemate on the western front. A ‘landships committee’ was set up under the auspices of the Navy, initiating a search for a vehicle that could carry artillery across land as if it were water. A ‘land is sea’ metaphor dominated the minds of military planners. The landship had a literary pedigree. The early science-fiction writer, H.G. Wells, had constructed a story around ‘land iron-clads’ (early armoured battleships used in the American Civil War) (Wright, 2000: 25–6). The result of their work was a vehicle that in early accounts was described as a ‘land-dreadnought’ after the battleship of that name. This vehicle became known as the ‘tank’ because when it was first used at the battle of the Somme in 1916, soldiers were told that they were tanks for freshwater storage in order to maximise its surprise. However, the maritime schematisation continued to exert a powerful hold. Those who served in tanks repeatedly used nautical metaphors to describe the experience. One observer described the tank raising ‘herself on the incline, like a ship rising to a wave’, adding ‘we were to sail over stranger seas than man had ever crossed’. The schema exerted a physical effect when early tank crews suffered from sea-sickness. The ‘landship’ is an excellent example of Cognitive Blend Theory in action. Even its early name is a blend of two concepts, the land and the sea. Blend theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998; Turner, 1998; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) describes the act of conceptual integration that underpins not only much metaphor but a whole series of related thought processes. Characterised by a certain indeterminacy of outcome

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the process can produce the type of precision solutions associated with mathematical argument (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 65) and should therefore not be associated with the easy dissolution of semantic boundaries that is a feature of some traditional metaphor description. Using the model of Fauconnier and Turner (1998), I will show how this works with the example of the tank that has just been described. In Figure 1.1 I have reproduced Fauconnier and Turner’s diagram of a blend structure in order to accommodate my example of the landship. The core blend structure consists of four mental spaces: two inputs, the blend and the generic space. The generic space contains what the inputs have in common and maps this onto each of them. In this case, it is that of an artillery platform moving on a disturbed surface. The input spaces contain the elements that will be fed into the blend. The two input spaces are connected by arrows that reflect a process known as ‘matching’ or forming ‘counterpart connections’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 47). In the blend each part can assume the other’s function to create a ‘ship-world’ where what happens in one can be assumed to hold for the other. However, elements that have not been matched retain their distinctiveness. Thus ‘sea’ and ‘land’ have acquired the same

Generic space Artillery platform moving on a disturbed surface Input

Warship as manoeuvrable artillery platform, sea swell

Input

Blend

Land-vehicle, field gun, caterpillar tractor, torn ground

Landship

Figure 1.1 An application of Fauconnier and Turner’s 1998 cognitive blend model: the landship and the conceptualisation of the battle tank

The Study of Metaphor 21

roughened surface over which we must roam at will. However, ‘sea’ and ‘land’ retain their distinctive nature forcing the creation of a tracked vehicle as opposed to one that can simply float through the earth. This distinctiveness requires a novel and unmatched feature that was essential to the successful realisation of the blend. This novelty was the American development of the caterpillar tractor, allowing tracked vehicles which could treat the land as a surface one can roam across as if it were the sea. This may simplify the procedure somewhat as the tractor may actually be the input to another, secondary blend, which realises the conceptualisation of the first. A blend selects the features it requires according to the needs of the generic space. Thus, although a raised prow was an early feature of the ‘tank’ and helped negotiate terrain, the sharp bow was not because land and sea are finally dissimilar. The dotted lines linking the different mental spaces reflect the interactivity of the blend process. A given feature may shift out of or back into a space at any given moment. The tank example also illustrates how ‘blends’ interact. There were many other schema that shaped the emergence of the tank. A popular early comparison was to some huge dinosaur or, in respect for its maritime influence, some monster of the deep (Wright, 2000). Two other historical visions that inspired its creation were the protective ‘tortoise’ formation used by Roman legionaries and the medieval siege tower. Although metaphor and analogy are two of the structures that emerge from the blend process, they are by no means the only ones. Blends underlie many different aspects of human thought. Some of the mental operations that depend on blends are acts of problem-solving, riddles, cause-and-effect statements, spatial and temporal relationships (as when we can compress time and space to find ourselves where we are not) and category formation. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) cite the Pythagorean theorem as an act of mathematical problem-solving using blend processes. The theorem regarding the squares of the sides of a right-angled triangle depends on our ability to retain the sides as an image of themselves and to project their existence as the sides of squares of the same dimension. The concept of squared number is itself a kind of blend, resulting from the projection of the number as the sides of the square whose area it denotes. Blend structures suppose the mingling of ideas and identities to create something new. At the same time the identities of the constituents remain intact in the input mental spaces. The blend process underlies metaphor creation while showing how metaphor-making processes are implicated in wider acts of human creativity and invention. This can be

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at the level of conceptualisation, as when ‘space’ is ‘blended’ into some poorly formed sense of our mortality, or of the transience of phenomena, to create a concept, time, that we can envisage and manipulate. The blend also operates on knowable phenomena as when we take the body of a horse and blend it with that of a human being to create a mythical creature, a centaur. If visual and text metaphors are linked together by core underlying themes or conceptual metaphors, then CBT suggests the mechanism through which these metaphors arise in the first place. It also suggests how a conceptual metaphor can spin off a given textual realisation. For example, Shakespeare was not unusual in conceptualising ‘beauty’ as ‘brightness ‘ or ‘luminosity’. When he imagined beauty in the typical sixteenth- or seventeenth-century setting of a torch-lit masquerade, he produced a blend between this ready-made conceptualisation, ‘beauty is brightness’, and its imagined zone of display, ‘a torch-lit ball’. This produces the essence of Romeo’s opening remark to Juliet ‘thou dost teach the torches to burn bright’. Yet, there are two prior conceptualisations that make this utterance possible. Their blends are also present in this image. These involve a double personification, the treatment of torches as students who are open to instruction, and luminous beauty as a teacher. The two additional themes would give us what can be called a multiple blend, or a blend with multiple inputs (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). The blend, ‘beauty is brightness’, may not have been made by Shakespeare when he created the image ‘thou dost teach the torches to burn bright’. ‘Beauty is brightness’ may have been a blend made at another moment and stored for future use. It will then have been stored as a conceptual metaphor or as a way to grasp the abstract concept, beauty. Such stored blends, or conceptual metaphors, are mental patterns or schemas. These schemas are a resource that we use to conceptualise other ideas with other blends. ‘Beauty is brightness’ would produce ‘love’ is a ‘lamp’ (Troilus and Cressida) or ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example.

How abstract meaning is conceptualised through metaphor and image schema We now have two central features of cognitivist metaphor theory. The first describes how metaphors are formed; the second holds that metaphors are produced by other conceptual metaphors. These conceptual metaphors are the products of blends and spin off the further blends that make up metaphors in text. The more radical argument is that all abstract meaning expresses itself through the functions of the

The Study of Metaphor 23

body or the way in which the body situates itself in the world. Image schemas are the mental images that we have of ourselves as an embodied mind and of its embodied interactions with the physics of the world. We use these images as a resource from which we form conceptual metaphors. Image schemas are conceptual resources provided by some of our earliest perceptions of ourselves as embodied creatures that are subject to physical experience. We exploit these resources with blends that occur early in life and which are then stored or schematised as conceptual metaphors for later use. For example, an infant who stands for the first time, hauling themselves up on a coffee table or whatever, will experience a huge sense of satisfaction, perhaps displayed by a large smile. They have an image schema of being ‘up’, and of ‘balance’ as they learn how to retain that position. Standing up is a very positive experience for an infant. Therefore the image schema of ‘up’ and ‘balance’ are blended by the coincidence of the infant’s experience of them into the metaphor ‘up is happiness’ or ‘balance is positive’. Grady (1997) calls such blends primary metaphors, and from them one can derive a series of conceptualisations. For example, ‘balance’ is central to the expression of argument ( Johnson, 1987 and 1991) as in ‘weigh the ideas’ or ‘the scales of justice’. The core concept of ‘balance’ as it is equated with the achievement of remaining physically upright creates a schema or mental pattern. From that schema we produce the blends, ‘balanced equations’, ‘balanced arguments’ and ‘balanced points of view’. When upright, we are capable of rapid movement from one location to another. When we walk from one place to another we perceive those two places as connected by our line of movement. They are linked. Causation is also perceived as this type of connection. We talk of events as ‘linked’ or ‘connected’. Perhaps this is because when I hold the hand of a child and move, the child must also move. If I want my movement to affect another object, I must touch it. Movement creates a connection. When I walk from one place to another I perceive those two places as connected by my line of movement. Accordingly, Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 170–234) see causation as often conceptualised through the image schema of a ‘path’ conducting movement between ‘states’ which are thought of as if they were ‘locations’. The ‘path’ creates the connection between points that allows one to affect another. Thus one can be ‘led from one conclusion to another’ as if from location to location. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) wider implication is that the entire apparatus of abstract expression is metaphorically structured. Effectively, we

24 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

can only refer to abstract ideas by conceptualising them as phenomena that can be processed through the senses. Thus we conceptualise time through our experience of space, and emotions through the experience of our own physical or embodied mind. We know our bodies as containers of the heat that is anger or conductors of the cold that is fear ( Johnson, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993; Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Reexamining this observation through CBT, we can say that we feel anger as a rise in bodily temperature that we hold within us until we can no longer stand the pressure. How we experience anger as a physical sensation blends with our experience of it as an emotion. Anger is thus conceptualised as a pressure that will ‘burst out’ when it becomes too great. More contentiously, the conceptual metaphor may also be a schema through which new metaphors are understood (see for example Gibbs, 1994). For example, if we hear the phrase ‘a wobbly argument’ for the first time, we will know that it means the argument is unsound because we carry within the mind a schematic association between logical or successful argument and balance. This schematisation partly functions through our sense of ‘balance’ as positive which may derive from our earlier experience of the pleasure of standing unaided for the first time. It represents one of the core set of schema provided by early physical experiences which we later use to map abstract thought.

Some of the conceptual metaphors that produce abstract language are culturally-specific and some are universal The landship example, used above, makes clear how metaphor-making underpins invention and creativity with its fusion of unlike ideas. The example also illustrates how such successful conceptualisations are steered by schemas that are enduring and powerful. Culture affects the development and durability of the schematisation. The tank was a product of Britain’s maritime culture. Britain developed a cultural predisposition that sees the sea as its domain. To project its power further into Europe, it must project the ocean itself. As this is impossible its military planners are tempted towards the blends that result in a land vehicle that performs like a ship. Despite the decline of Britain’s maritime interest, much English expression and idiom still bears the imprint of this older cultural association. For example, ‘trim your jib to the wind’, ‘drift’, ‘be adrift’, ‘cast away’, ‘go with the flow’, ‘be carried along by the current’, ‘batten down the hatches’, ‘weather the storm’, ‘come about’ (ships turning), ‘push

The Study of Metaphor 25

off’, and so forth. Such idioms show how a near-extinct socio-economic function can persist in language as a formative cultural effect. A possibility is that the conceptualisations that these culturally fashioned blends pass into language may actually alter the way we conceptualise a subject. Studies of time and of time’s expression in language (Alverson, 1995; Núñez et al., 1997) have always been of particular interest to those who wish to explore the relationship between culture and language. This interest was aroused by Sapir (1956) and Whorf’s (1956) now discredited view that different representations of time in the Hopi language entailed a different cultural construction or a different way of seeing. A common conceptualisation of time views the present as the place where the speaker is found, the future as spatially in front of them and the past as behind (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 140). A very few languages such as Ayamaran in Northern Chile place the future behind the observer and the present in front (Núñez et al., 1997). This reverses the more common conceptualisation of an individual going forward to the future and back to the past. The Ayamaran see the past as in front of them because it is known and hence can be seen, and the future as behind because it as yet undiscovered. This example reveals how a universal metaphor, ‘time is space’ can create different interpretations in different cultures. Yu (1998) has also made an extensive study of both the common and culturally divergent conceptualisations that mark English and Chinese. Emotions in both languages are conceptualised through bodily function, and the body is perceived as a container in both cases. But Chinese focuses on different disturbances to different organs. One can observe something similar but on a lesser scale of divergence between English and French. In France indigestion generally resides in sickness to the liver (mal au fois), in English to the stomach. Metaphor is thus an instrument through which cultures impose different ways of seeing on language. The assertion is not that the impact of culture is so strong that it forces different people from different cultures to inhabit radically different realities. Rather, the same perceptions of the same phenomena are categorised and expressed somewhat differently, and language learning assumes some adoption of these different ways of seeing.

Grammar as originating in metaphor over time Cognitive linguists have argued that grammar is another system of abstract meaning-creation which we derive through metaphor

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(for example Langacker, 1990, 1994; Heine et al., 1991; Heine, 1997). An inflection is added to a word to change its meaning slightly or situate it differently towards the other meanings of other words. Thus in English, when we add ‘s to John in the phrase ‘John’s book’, we are indicating that ‘John’ is the possessor of the book. Grammatical meanings and the inflections by which they are sometimes carried arise from a process known as grammaticalisation (see for example Heine and Reh, 1984; Hopper and Traugött, 1993). According to the grammaticalisation thesis, certain words become more grammatical as the language evolves over time, and this process is achieved though not necessarily motivated by metaphor. For example, a preposition may begin as the metaphorical development of a noun body part, reflecting the orientation of the body to the world (Heine, 1997). This can be seen in words such as the English ‘back or ahead’. In its function as a preposition, the word, ‘back’, which represented a body part, will assume a grammatical role, specifying the meanings that arise from the relationship between other terms. In a final but far from universal stage the preposition may become part of the noun, thus creating the case endings of inflected languages such as Latin. We also see grammaticalisation, and hence metaphor, as underlying the expression of time in verb tenses. For example the early Latin kantabumos (we sing) was created when ‘bumos’, a form of the verb ‘to be’ was affixed or joined to the verb ‘kantar’. By ‘process of phonological reduction’ this became ‘cantabimus’ (Fox, 1994). However, other schemas are also active. The schemas that drive language-change undermine the grammatical forms that they create. Despite the stabilisation of the first Latin future, a second Latin future evolved as ‘cantare habemus’ or literally ‘we have to sing’. The implication is of the future as an action that we are moving towards so that we can take hold of it. We are grasping the future action and so bringing it into a speculative existence. This evolved into another suffix, presumably by elisions such as ‘cantar (hab) em(u)s’ that gave the future in French as ‘(nous) chanterons’ (Fox, 1994). The development of the future in romance still shows no sign of having ended. We see the future also as walking forward towards a state or action or as motion (Heine, 1993). In English, this manifests as ‘I am going to sing’. In French, it is ‘nous allons chanter’. Interestingly, that future is now preferred in French to the grammaticalised ‘nous chanterons’ (Fox, 1994). I should stress that the role of metaphor in language change is controversial, even within a school of thought about language that is fundamentally cognitivist. Yet a clear principle is the view that the study of

The Study of Metaphor 27

grammar is only meaningful if it is studied diachronically or as it has evolved over time (Heine, 1997). Only in a diachronic study can one retrieve the image-schematic and metaphorical origins of a grammar or syntax. In the case of the French ‘going-to’ future, we understand the conceptual metaphors that still function as active schema within us, determining why a given language will express things as it does.

Conclusions In this chapter I have tried to summarise a large and complicated area of research. I began by looking at why some intellectual traditions have found metaphor difficult, and then looked at how this difficulty translates into the problem of knowing when language is or is not metaphorical. I have put forward the position that there is no formal test for metaphor and that how we judge the literalness of language is the judgement of a community of language users at any one time. Our concern should not be with whether metaphors are alive, dying or dead. Metaphors can flout conventional uses of language because they create new meanings or draw attention to ones that we did not quite know were there. Metaphors can also become part of conventional language use. For this book, the main interest in new metaphor is in how it draws attention to a wider cognitive process that is responsible for the way we conceptualise abstract meaning in language. For the language teacher, the important point that we should carry forward is that metaphor reveals a great deal about how the mind: ● ● ●

conceptualises the meanings expressed in language; copes with the new and the strange; and acquires and uses new knowledge.

Metaphor cannot have serious consideration without reference to the broader areas of cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. The interest of cognitive linguists is not in language as an isolated or separate phenomenon that we must study for the structures or systems that we can find in it; the interest is in how language reveals the mental processes that shape it. Such a concern shifts our treatment of language from something isolated and unique towards one which understands its nature as bound up with how we learn and think. I will now consider what this means for the classroom teacher.

2 Using Figurative Language

In the last chapter, a key point was that studying metaphor was more than looking at an attractive but unusual use of language. For this study such figures of speech are interesting because of what they reveal about the thought processes that produce them. The processes revealed by figurative language allow us to conceptualise abstract meaning. Abstraction begins as a figure of speech but becomes an accepted convention of language. At first sight, therefore, it might seem perverse to begin our study of the pedagogical interest of this idea by returning to the rarer figures of speech that reveal how we engage in the ubiquitous process of abstraction. I am going to postpone my look at the larger role of metaphor and think instead about how we can help students to attain a better and more confident control of figurative language and idiom. There are three reasons to do this. First an appropriate instructional sequence should start with the obvious acts of metaphor production. The skills that are developed by recognising the obvious might then be turned to uncovering forms that are hidden by their familiarity. Second, linguistic creativity is a function of successful language use. Metaphor formation, whether of real or imagined originality, underpins such creativity. It therefore follows that students should be encouraged to adopt the linguist licence that live metaphor requires. They can treat the target language less as a prefabricated environment to which they must adapt their capacity for expression and more as a resource that will respond to their expressive needs. Third, live metaphor is about finding new or hitherto unexposed meanings. To encourage metaphor’s process of meaning-creation may be to encourage students to ask what even mundane words mean in a wider and deeper sense. For example, we can explore Wittgenstein’s (1953) 28

Using Figurative Language 29

famous observation that we find it impossible to define a term such as ‘a game’ in a manner that includes the large and diverse range of phenomena and activities to which that category can refer. Grasping this breadth of reference is also to encourage thought about where we can take the meaning of a term as we stretch it into metaphor. Therefore some thought about how to get students to build metaphor will lead us first to an exploration of what we mean by a term and how we build and manipulate the category that this term represents.

The language of metaphor In the last chapter, I used some common examples of metaphors that were constructed with the copula verb ‘to be’. Sentence 12 is another such example 12

She is my world.

I used such copula metaphors because these sentences reveal most clearly how a metaphor has two subjects (Black, 1962), or two parts that Richards (1936) would call a vehicle and the other the tenor. These subjects represent two areas of meaning or, as we might now say, two domains that are blended one with another. This does not mean that copula metaphors are central to what metaphor is or that their occurrence is particularly common. Examples with the copula verb are useful because they show clearly the paradoxical nature of a form that asserts something to be true when clearly it is not. Philosophers and linguists use copula metaphors because they display the contrastive and unusual use of meaning that exists in all metaphor. Equally, if teachers want to alert students to the potential of figurative language, copula metaphors are a useful departure point because they offer such a clear example of what ‘figurative’ means. This is why I will focus first upon a form that reveals the features of metaphor most clearly.

Stretching the domain At root a use of metaphor requires an understanding of how one domain of meaning spills over into another or blends with it and becomes something else. A copula metaphor such as 12, above, illustrates how this can happen because of the manner in which it retains two entities as separate. ‘She’ retains the identity of a person, and ‘the world’ of the planet

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people inhabit, even as we blend them to create a new identity, ‘a person that is everything in the world’. Because metaphors begin with breakdown of secure meanings teachers can first persuade learners to reexamine that security of meaning. In doing this the learner may start to redraw the category boundaries on which the meaning depends. They may then fashion the material of metaphor.

What categories mean Category construction is central to language and to how we think about the world. Any meaning that we generalise beyond one person or article is essentially a type of category. If I use the word ‘cup’, for example, this refers to a category of articles which generally hold liquids but which may also mean a sports trophy that could hold a liquid if required. The word is meaningful because of its capacity to evoke that category. Different languages may operate with different boundaries for the same category. An obvious and much cited example is that of colour. The Dani in New Guinea only use two colours. Nobody suggests that this means the Dani see a rainbow as black and white; it means that their language is dividing up the spectrum differently and that ‘black’ and ‘white’ refer to larger domains in Dani than in English. How far that difference in division fosters a different perception is a matter of intense debate. But for the language teacher the central issue is that their students should recognise the type of division that is being made in the TL (target language) and how far this may differ from that of the students’ L1 (first language). The view of category held in rational philosophy was that categories are somehow inviolable; phenomena group themselves in accordance with what they are. Reality presents itself as already divided under such labels as organic and inorganic, and it is further subdivided into plant and animal or metal and rock. It does not matter which culture we come from and which language we speak, we operate with the same basic divisions. Translating basic meanings across languages is therefore a relatively straightforward matter. Students learn the meaning of words in their own L1 then use them in the L2 with comparative ease. Yet any language learner knows that when we move beyond basic categories, matters are not so simple. For example, ‘rock’ and ‘stone’ do not represent the same categories even between American and British English. Many languages do not make the rock–stone category difference at all. Flying in the face of a long philosophical tradition, Rosch (1975, 1978) revealed how categories were neither stable nor consistent. We do

Using Figurative Language 31

not recognise robins, eagles and ostriches as birds because they share such features as beaks, wings and feathers. We do not set up a ‘bird’ category as meaning the sharing of the features, ‘beaks’, ‘wings’ and ‘feathers’. Rosch found categories to be anchored in cognition by a prototypical example. When studying how Americans formed the category of ‘a bird’, Rosch found that it was most often around the robin. The robin was central to their idea of what a bird was. Some species such as the ostrich were clearly peripheral, with the penguin and the bat ranked at the extreme edge of the class (Rosch, 1975). A category, then, is not a defining set of features that preselects which items belong to it and which do not. Lakoff (1987) developed Rosch’s ideas towards a conception of radial category construction. This radial model makes a more powerful assertion of Rosch’s contention that there is not a set of shared features which predetermine whether something is a member of a category or not. The members of a category which radiate out from the central prototype do not always share any of the features of the prototype. Lakoff (1987: 85) cites the case of Japanese young women giving their child to an older woman to raise. That older woman does not exist within the English language model of motherhood and cannot be predicted by any prototypical example of it because she does not have a core biological or legal relationship to the child. Arguably such categories extend themselves through an underlying principle that could be termed metaphorical. Although this was not part of Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances, his example makes the case clearly. A category is essentially a family or grouping of phenomena. For Wittgenstein (1953), a chain of resemblances can be traced from the central member towards the outlying one. This chain means that adjacent family members are similar even if they do not share traits of similarity with all of those who are not adjacent. Uncle Tom may be central to a family’s conception of itself. He may have an uncanny resemblance to his sister, Aunt Edwina in every respect apart from her eye and hair colour. Aunt Edwina could also resemble her cousin Jane but only in respect of her eye colour and hair colour. Jane and Tom do not resemble each other but they share resemblances through Edwina. In this way, people belonging to a family may not all appear to resemble each other and it may be impossible to identify the characteristics that are common to the entire family. Therefore, we cannot produce a definition which identifies that family as a category which is different from others. Nonetheless, a chain of resemblance can be traced from one group to another, and such family resemblances have been used to construct a theory of category formation (Ungerer and Schmid, 1996). In this

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construction, we can see how categories become metaphors; they are groupings of phenomena that may map features from one to another but they do not always retain one set of common features that covers the whole category. ‘Oaks’, ‘willows’ and ‘beech’ are members of the category of ‘trees’. They also form their own categories and these include the types of tree to which they refer. We say that the category ‘oaks’ is subordinate to the category of ‘trees’ and ‘trees’ are superordinate to ‘oaks’. A class inclusion statement is one where we say that a subordinate category is a member of a superordinate one. For example, we say that ‘novels are books’. At first sight this looks like a straightforward, literal statement; yet, even in order to say this we are extending the category boundaries of the compliment, ‘books’. A prototypical book consists of leaves of printed paper enclosed by a binding. Yet here we are not talking about the object at all but the form taken by its text and thé fact that this tells a type of story. In order to accommodate the idea of a ‘novel’, ‘book’ has been moved into the realm of metaphor. Or, from a perspective of cognitive blend theory, we might say that our prototypical ‘book’, with its leaves and paper, is blended with our idea of a novel or a story to create some hybrid, ‘a certain type of text on bound sheets of paper’. Now, if we consider an obvious metaphor such as ‘She is my world’, we might wonder if something similar is going on. A category, ‘world’, is being blended with a particular person to create a creature who encompasses the reality we want to see and feel. Like Glucksberg and Keysar (1993), we might therefore wonder if metaphors are not also ‘class inclusion statements’. This also explains why we obtain considerable satisfaction from a metaphor that seems to tell us something about a phenomenon we had never thought about. Things that exist outside categories are strange and threatening. We do not know whether they are poisonous or nourishing, dangerous or helpful. A metaphor brings a phenomenon into a state of knowledge. It provides us with the relief and satisfaction of giving a conceptual home to something that is strange and different. A conclusion for the teacher who wants to lead their students towards a stronger use of metaphor might be that they should look at how to extend category boundaries, thus bringing unknown meanings inside those that are known. If we treat categories as radial and therefore as extensible as metaphors, we have another problem. The problem is how we can cognitively manipulate categories or communicate a view of them with any precision when they cover large and varied types of meaning that can at any moment incorporate other yet stranger subordinate meanings.

Using Figurative Language 33

For example, we can say ‘buy some new cups’ and have a clear understanding of what is meant despite the fact that the ‘cup’ category encompasses a variety of different objects. Some of these objects, like the silver sports trophy and the china coffee mug, do not even share a function and are quite distant in their shape. Lakoff (1987) suggests that the larger category can be manipulated by one of its members through a process that emerges from another figure of speech, metonymy. In the sentence, ‘all hands on deck’, ‘hands’ stands for a topic, ‘sailors’. Yet this is not traditionally thought of as a metaphor because ‘the hands’ are a part of what they stand for. We can call this a contiguous relationship, because one item represents another that borders upon it spatially. Thus wheels can stand for the car to which they are joined in ‘a nice set of wheels’, and ‘London’ for the broadcasters located in that city in ‘this is London calling’. Ullman (1962) argued that contiguity also refers to items that are not just joined spatially, but which have abutting domains of meaning. For example, in the saying ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, the pen evokes the larger field of writing and language use while ‘the sword’ evokes conflict and warfare. Ullman called this semantic contiguity. Metonymy is therefore an expression that relates to another on the grounds of either semantic or spatial contiguity. Lakoff and Turner (1989) extended the meaning of metonymy still further when they argued that it is a relationship where: 1 one part of an entity stands for the whole; 2 one item of a category or group stands for the category or group; 3 single items are used to evoke a larger set of items with which they have a schematic or mentally established association (Lakoff and Turner, 1989). For our present purposes, the second item is the most interesting. We can see this relationship when a category, ‘trees’ sets up a domain of meaning that incorporates other members, ‘oaks’, ‘willows’ or ‘beech’. Sometimes, we point to ‘oaks’ and talk about ‘trees’. The oaks are then standing for the category to which they belong. The larger category of trees is being represented by a few of its members, ‘oaks’. Therefore, Lakoff (1987) can argue that metonymy may also be involved in category representation. Languages sometimes use subordinate categories to name the whole category. For example, in British English, one of the best-known makes of vacuum cleaner came to stand for the whole category of vacuum

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cleaners when we called them ‘hoovers’. Equally, there is a Native American language which calls ‘trees’ and ‘cotton-woods’, a species of tree, by the same name (Glucksberg, 2001). This is probably because the cotton-wood is the most significant kind of tree in their landscape and culture. Metonymy therefore reveals how we can conceptualise and then manipulate a large and complicated category such as ‘trees’, ‘marriage’ or ‘buildings’ through one of the subordinate and perhaps prototypical members. As Rosch has shown, ‘robins’ are central to the American construction of ‘birds’. Because ‘robins’ are a bird’s unspoken and unconscious metonym they allow Americans to cognitively manipulate a category which includes such diverse creatures as ‘hummingbirds’ and ‘ostriches’ as if it were a singular, homogeneous whole. If metonymy explains how we manipulate a given category, we now have one additional problem to explain; this is why we choose a particular metonym to manipulate a given category. In fact, we can also answer this by asking the same question of metonymic figures of speech. The answer lies in Lakoff’s (1987) concept of an ICM, or idealised cognitive model. The ICM embodies not just a set of associated meanings for a given term, but extends also to the larger set of attributes that is provided by a culture. For example, a dictionary definition of a cow might talk about its being a bovine quadruped. But this does not really provide us with much sense of what a cow really is and what it means to us. We have a construction that is both larger and also more precise. It is one which perhaps evokes the creatures swollen udders and their ponderous but productive bulk. This larger conceptualisation of the animal is furnished by its ICM. Different cultures will produce different ICMs. The average Indian may associate cows with sanctity and fertility, the average American with milk production. A different ICM may highlight different attributes of the category in question. If we think again about the phrase ‘all hands’, we might ask why we talk about hands instead of sailors. An interesting but obvious reply would be because we do not really mean ‘sailors’. It is their ‘hands’ that are needed on deck to pull in sail. A given situation is emphasising a given aspect of the larger category. In an old maritime culture that emphasis would start to take precedence over others and we would start to talk about ‘hands’ or ‘deck hands’, rather than sailors. We can see this in the way words evolve over time. Radden and Kövecses (1999: 20–1) give as an example the evolution of the word ‘hearse’. A hearse used to mean the larger set of meanings

Using Figurative Language 35

associated with the apparatus of death: the dead body, the coffin, the bier, the tomb, the funeral pall, the framework supporting the pall and the carriage for carrying the coffin. In nineteenth-century culture, however, people attached greater importance to the funeral procession, perhaps because this was what most of them saw. Thus although the ICM of ‘hearse’ still included the larger apparatus of death, it came to stress its public face, or its processional vehicle. At first this processional vehicle is like a tab with which we can cognitively manipulate the larger set of meanings. But the cultural emphasis that continues to be placed upon the processional vehicle means that its wider set of associated meanings start to fall away. ‘Hearse’ now refers only to a category of vehicles. The way in which a culture constructs a category will make some of its attributes more cognitively noticeable than others. The attributes that are emphasised can stand for the larger person. Metonymies are thus really about how we identify categories with features that a given set of culturally-framed circumstances make salient. They reveal how we manipulate categories themselves. Gibbs (1994) extends the scope of metonymy further when he shows how description involves part–whole representations of a kind that characterise the trope. This is possible because we can evoke larger and indeterminate sets of category members through a few specified examples. Thus, in 13 below, a larger forest is evoked by the mention of a few of its trees in a similar way to how the larger category of car is evoked by one of its parts, ‘the wheels’. 13 He marched along beside the outlying trees; beeches and oaks; sentinels of the vast and varied forest beyond. Overly detailed descriptions are rarely satisfying, and finally impossible to render. There may be a cognitive preference for the evocation of a scene through some of its parts. Just as a metaphor may reveal a more ubiquitous cognitive process related to conceptualisation and meaningcreation, so metonymy may reveal something about our ability to grasp a larger set of circumstances from a few apt details, or a wider scene from a few significant features. Consider this recollection of a dream induced in the English poet, Joseph Addison (1672–1719), by his slumber in a beautiful garden: 14 I fancied my self among the Alpes, and, as it is natural in a Dream, seemed every moment to bound from one Summit to another, till at last, after having made this airy Progress over the Tops of several

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Mountains, I arrived at the very centre of those broken Rocks and Precipes. (Papers from The Tatler and The Spectator (1710–12). J. Dixon Hunt and P. Willis (eds), The Genius of the Place. London: Paul Elek) A larger dream, Alpine landscape is evoked through a few of its features, ‘summits’, ‘tops of several mountains’, ‘rocks’ and ‘precipices’. Yet the dream-quality of the ‘Progress’ only adds to the writer’s lack of control over quite how the scene is evoked. In my imagination, it is not evoked as a real scene at all, but as a painting. The association of metonymy with this type of fluidity and imprecision adds to its metaphoric quality, when ‘metaphoric’ is construed as breaking down distinct meanings in order to forge others anew. Interesting principles suggest themselves to both MT (mother tongue) and FL (foreign language) teachers who want to develop the descriptive powers of their students. A first point is to ask students to envisage scenes of landscapes then to single out a few key elements, ‘a thief running down a busy shopping street’, or ‘a road bending round a mountain’, for example. Lists can be constructed on the board from varied scenes and different memories and imaginations, and the class can then organise different verbal pictures from the scattered words. A worthwhile variation for both literacy and language teachers is to write the words onto cards, then to treat the board as the scene while imagining that each card shows a drawing of its word. Thus, if there are mountains in the background, the class will tell the teacher to pin the word-card ‘mountains’ at the top of the board. Students then build pictures that they half read. Finally they describe the larger scene in writing, speech or both, saying what is where, while imagining the actual form that is evoked. Teachers can also push students towards metaphor by asking for closer descriptions of the categories: Teacher: ‘How are the trees?’ Student: (looks puzzled) Teacher: ‘Are they spread out?’ (spreads their hands across the board) Student: ‘No, together.’ Teacher: ‘Bunched.’ (pushes their palms together) For a language learner, three additional points have now emerged: 1 Categories are complicated and unwieldy, embracing many diverse phenomena without having a single core identity. In their complexity categories differ from one language to another. Categories deserve

Using Figurative Language 37

more class time because to explore them is to help understand how meanings may differ between languages. 2 Different cultures construct categories around different prototypes. Exploring these prototypes can help to make a classroom into a forum of cross-cultural understanding. 3 Metonymy shows how a culture may use a prototypical example of a category to manipulate its larger whole. Understanding more about the prototypes preferred by a language-using culture can help students understand how manipulating different languages involves manipulating different domains of meaning. When we grasp these differences of meaning, we can also consider how some categories extend into the domains of different metaphors.

What teachers and students can do with their understanding of categories Students can explore categories outside and inside the classroom. Category borders partly belong to cultures, and when Byram et al. (1991) launched the LARA (Language and Residence Abroad Project), one of their objectives was to help students come into closer contact with the target language of their culture. This meant making closer observation of cultural practices outside the classroom and thinking about the relationship of language to them. To achieve this aim they used techniques pioneered by ethnographers for the study of culture. An important principle for ethnographers is the achievement of distance. The researcher needs to treat the familiar as strange, perhaps by asking why it is as it is. This technique can be transposed into how we think about categories and what we think they should comprise. An appropriate example for this type of project is the supermarket. Supermarkets are themselves a category of shop that is subject to considerable cultural differentiation. This begins when one looks at its structure from the outside. Britain, for example, treats supermarkets as temples for consumerism, and one or two recent examples are contemporary architectural monuments. In France, however, supermarkets are built without consideration for anything except their function. A student of mine from the Yemen remarked how the market was his supermarket. He meant what we would call a bazaar. On reflection, we realised how the traditional bazaar brought all the functions of a supermarket together as a multitude of micro-businesses. This led to a discussion about whether we had ever really needed supermarkets at all. More interesting than the supermarket building and its location is how it categorises and hence organises what it sells. This varies between

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cultures and responds to changing commercial pressures. Supermarkets are like a metaphor for an exposed mind. They reveal the conscious construction of certain categories. When I sent some language students to look closely at a supermarket, one of them noticed how tinned vegetables and fruit were not simply grouped as a tinned-goods category. Tinned tomatoes were placed near pasta. The importance of pasta was itself a surprise, dispelling some of the myths about British food. Pasta had gathered a large set of related products around it. The student suggested that the shop was planning its customers’ meals for them. It categorised some products according to a possible meal. You picked up your spaghetti from one shelf and your tomatoes from the shelf underneath it. We could now draw how the supermarket modelled the pasta category according to the perception of a modern British supermarket, and Figure 2.1 is a simplification of the board drawing that emerged:

Tinned tomatoes Tomato sauces Lasagne

Noodles

Spaghetti

Macaroni Cannelloni

Ready-made sauces

Tomato paste

Figure 2.1 How British supermarkets are rebuilding food categories

Using Figurative Language 39

This kind of exercise can be triggered by simple question and answer sheets. For example, go to a local supermarket and find out: 1 How far do traditional category distinctions hold, for example vegetables, fruit and meat? 2 In a given category, which product occupies a dominant or prime position? For fruit, is it apples or oranges or both? 3 How elaborate are certain categories? Do they display a large variety? 4 Which category lies next to which? 5 Is there a shopping order, or route round the shop? If so, what is its significance? 6 Do the category arrangements and shopping orders tell you anything about English dietary habits? 7 Were your assumptions about diet borne out by what you saw in peoples’ trolleys? 8 How does the British arrangement compare with what you remember of supermarkets in your own country? Most teachers will not be in a target language culture. However, the opportunities for studying one’s own shops and markets are still great. Those who look for cultural comparisons can also use the web. Already with such an exercise we are building an awareness of how meanings extend themselves and how they are reworked by different functions and needs. The exercise also introduces lexis in chains of association that perhaps mirror how it will be stored. Yet although the exercise shows how meanings stretch, it is still quite far from our first objective, which was to show how meanings become metaphorical. A further step involves encouraging students to let their thoughts roam, first amidst the meanings that the category draws together, then to chase after the other meanings with which these are associated. We can trigger such unstructured explorations with the simplest techniques. A core principle is to ask what a given word means to a given learner, as when I gave a class the word ‘building’ and asked them to visualise it, then asked one of the students to describe what they saw. The first aim here was to invite students to produce the metonym for the larger category. A secondary goal was to move students towards the extension of category boundaries that might move them towards metaphor-creation. In one class, the building was first described as a door with columns on each side. The door was fronted by an extended flight of steps. Appropriately, the student came from Italy. Their Palladian prototype was given the detail of ‘a roof projecting over the walls’. This elicited two

40 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

lexical items with which the Italian speaker was unfamiliar: ‘project’ (in this more literal sense) and ‘eves’. The description then fumbled around an elaborate attempted visualisation of another word, which I could not at first deduce. The word was ‘chimney’ and we moved around it with talk of ‘circles’ and ‘rectangles’. Interestingly, when the class finally realised what the student was talking about it was because they mentioned the word ‘fire’. The relationship of ‘fire’ to chimney is metonymic. A chimney-piece is contiguous to its fire. Clearly we need this type of metonymic shorthand if we are going to explain ourselves easily when our lexis is limited. Teachers also intuit this when they want to explain words that their students do not know. We may think that we are being ‘direct’ when we go to great lengths to describe the shape of a chimney, but we can be more so when we refer to the item with which it is associated. In this sense, a use of metonymy can form part of a strategic competence. A strategic competence is mostly about making full use of the language resources that one has at one’s disposal, however limited. When a chimney is evoked not through an elaborate description of its shape but through its ‘carrying’ of the ‘fire’ for which like smoke it is a metonym, it can be easily understood. Lexical lesson plans may often demonstrate an awareness of the potency of metonymic relationships when they are meronymic. Meronyms are terms which share a common structure. Thus ‘wheels’, ‘hub caps’, ‘brake’ and ‘clutch’ are all meronyms because they are car parts. A teacher will give a meronymic structure to a vocabulary lesson when they devote it to labelling the diagram of a car. However, a sense of metonymy expands these overtly physical ties into ones that conceptualise contiguity across wider and more idiosyncratic zones of meaning. When a wider network of semantic fields is invoked, I have heard ‘car’ yield ‘accident’ or ‘freedom’, not ‘wheel’, thereby opening associated territories of pain, folly or freedom. Categories do not always evoke the student’s culturally situated frame. An Italian may have suggested a Palladian stereotype for building, but a Japanese classmate described a house with brick walls and entrance hall that was the first English semi-detached home that they had entered. The stereotype was being reconstructed around what was for them a more recent and significant event, their arrival in a strange country, the UK. Perhaps, also, they felt the description would work better if it could be culturally shared with the teacher. Prototypes are unstable, not only between cultures but within the mind of a given individual, and they may change as we move from one country to another. ‘Cat’ could be framed differently by the same person

Using Figurative Language 41

when they are in different places (Ungerer and Schmid, 1996). Thus, when I am on Safari in Africa, the cat might be a lion. When I am at home, it might be the pet mewing at my feet. In the case of the Japanese student, a British suburban prototype had skewed a Japanese description. Some terms may be less culturally marked than a ‘building’. When a class moved on from the description of ‘buildings’ to ‘paths’, the descriptions were less differentiated. A Russian and a Japanese path sounded almost identical; both wound into dark woods. A second Japanese path linked itself more clearly to my picture of Japan – less threateningly, it led through ‘short’ trees. To coax students into stretching categories to build metaphors, one can give them a choice of abstract topics – ‘love’, ‘life’, ‘hatred’, ‘happiness’, ‘amazement’ and so on – then encourage them to aim for utterances such as ‘my life is a path strewn with leaves’, only asking for an interpretation of the topic at the end. In doing this the students understand how they can push out a domain of associated meanings, then observe how it overlaps with those of other very different entities. In stretching the frame, the students might also become aware that even these extended domains impose strictures on what one can do with them. They might understand, for example, that to say ‘a path crowded with leaves’ is wrong because leaves cannot be treated as people that are agents in an action. Leaves are helpless objects strewn by the wind; they cannot crowd the footpath. We must vest a human agency in phenomena we cannot control, the wind, the weather and the seasons. These human agents boss other, more passive phenomena, such as leaves. To see if students can map their extended meanings onto topics with which they have no surface resemblance, one can create abstract terms or qualities such as ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’ by adding the suffix ‘-ness’ to form nouns from adjectives. Because these exist at a high level of abstraction they are more likely to demand metaphorical description. I asked the students to focus on three words: Happy – happiness Mad – madness Useful – usefulness The class tried to imagine a scene or object for these items in exactly the same way as with the concrete categories, ‘building’ and ‘path’. The students discussed their thoughts for a few seconds with a partner then summarised them to the class by supplying the compliment in a sentence of the type: ‘Happiness is … ’. When some students tried to define

42 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

the term instead of representing it, for example ‘Happiness is a nice feeling’, I told them I wanted something concrete, and gave as an example, something I remembered from a Japanese poem: ‘The moon on the branch of the tree is a fan.’ I asked what kind of sentence this was, then when they became puzzled, introduced the term ‘metaphorical’ to describe it. When it was clear that they understood a metaphor was, I could state explicitly that I wanted metaphors of madness or happiness, not definitions. After correction and teacher paraphrasing, the following types of sentences were produced: Madness is too much drink. Happiness is too much to drink. Happiness is lying in the sun. Usefulness is a car. Happiness is meeting a girl. Sadness is when Real Madrid loses to Barcelona. Next the class tried to build a more extensive list of words using the suffix -ness, for example: lonely – loneliness happy – happiness strange – strangeness cold – coldness mad – madness lovely – loveliness

useful – usefulness bright – brightness loveless – lovelessness sad – sadness wakeful – wakefulness

I asked them to write down metaphors that evoked these terms, repeating the example, ‘the moon on the branch of a tree is a fan’. The example was not a good one since it was descriptive and visual rather than evocative. After some difficulty they read out their metaphors in turn but did not name the topic; the topic had to be supplied by another member of the class who would produce a complete metaphor. The first metaphor ‘… a full moon over the sea’, started a discussion: most students opted for ‘happiness’ as the topic, but the one who produced the metaphor had a more literal interpretation than the rest of the class. Her topic was ‘brightness’ (brightness is a full moon over the sea). Other students produced such metaphors as: Losing my money in (at) gamble(ing) (madness) Being without my children (loneliness)

Using Figurative Language 43

And after some correction: ‘Being in the middle of the Sahara’, which everybody agreed was ‘loneliness’. Other metaphors were equally transparent: To be abandoned at your wedding humorous intervention: happiness) Safeway supermarket (usefulness)

(sadness, but provoking the

When looking for metaphors, some students drifted towards idiom, drawing upon ones that existed in their mother tongue. One tried to translate: ‘Turning quickly trying to bite your ear’, but they were not immediately understood. It was not the opacity of the metaphor that made understanding difficult; it was the language in which the metaphor was expressed. The speaker asked a classmate to bite their own ear while demonstrating how impossible this was. Several students suggested: ‘Madness is turning quickly, trying to bite your ear.’ Students are often keen to look for idiomatic equivalents in the target language (TL). Madness, for example, seemed to invite translated idioms, such as ‘Sitting on a horse facing backwards’, but this again caused confusion and needed a drawing to show the literal meaning. As I drew I asked the class how they would respond if they saw a horse coming down the street outside with its rider facing backwards. The topic was then identified: Madness is sitting on a horse facing backwards. Translating idioms can be a lesson’s primary activity, encouraging a creative use of the target language. The teacher can ask each student to read out the literal translation of an idiom for which they know no target language equivalent. Next, the teacher may ask other class members to interpret it. When they get a correct interpretation, the teacher asks how this metaphor expresses the point that is being made. The teacher can then supply a target language equivalent, if one exists. Students can then deconstruct this and explain the metaphors from which it has evolved. Finally, the teacher can tell them how the idiom actually evolved. For example: Teacher: ‘Kicked the bucket? What has kicking buckets got to do with death?’ Student: (shrugs) Teacher: (kicks over a spare chair)

44 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher:

‘The death kicks you down.’ ‘Death kicks you over like a bucket and life.’ (gestures away from their body with their hands) ‘Life, ah, goes out of the bucket.’ ‘Life spills out of the bucket.’ (teacher turns away, walks towards the board, then turns back and shrugs) ‘Sorry but it isn’t true.’

The teacher then explains that that idiom derives from how a slaughtered animal would kick the bucket used to catch its blood just before it died.

Achieving greater freedom with meaning: describing things as other than themselves Pedagogy takes a conscious approach to metaphor construction when it collectively stretches a word’s category boundaries then uses the stretched concept to express an abstract expression of quality such as ‘brightness’. Another approach is to invite a freer and less conscious exploration of meaning. Newmark (1988) would call this use of metaphor connotative, because of how one meaning can freely connote another. Holyoak and Thagard (1995) describe the mathematician, Poincaré, as documenting his own creative process as sleepless nights when ‘ideas rose in crowds’ and were felt to ‘collide’ until they ‘interlocked’ as ‘stable combinations’. ‘The most fertile’ ‘combinations’ would ‘often be drawn from domains that’ were ‘far apart’ (ibid.). This description characterises the paradox that is central to metaphor. On the one hand the concept of a conceptual metaphor suggests that metaphors arise from patterns and can be grouped in a principled manner. If metaphor is a key to conceptualisation, then it is essential to a process where uncertain meanings are given the identity of a known category. On the other hand, the ‘combinations’ are not predictable or singular. The combinations create patterns that cannot be predicted from the nature of their components. Affective and humanistic teachers have always understood how relaxation techniques or music can help make some students less resistant to their own feelings. Exposing students to their own emotions is to give them topics or feelings that demand expression. Learners who need to speak may be more ready to risk themselves in an unfamiliar language. Learners who speak on issues that matter to them may also treat the TL as material that can respond to their expressive needs. The earlier interest in affective language teaching techniques resulted in the humanistic encounters of Moskowitz (1978) and the Suggestopedy of

Using Figurative Language 45

Lozanov (1978). For Lozanov (1978), such techniques still originate in a behavourist or Pavlovian association of stimulus and response. The attachment of language to a more powerful and enduring stimulus achieves a more resonant and enduring process of habit formation. Yet it may be that the enduring success of techniques such as Moskowitz’s (1978) guided fantasies relates more to how they threaten our networks of preestablished meanings. The fantasy suggests that one meaning can metamorphose into another. Such listless chains of associations can remind students that their limited competence or their interlanguage is more an index of possibilities than a cramped repository of communicative failure. In a free and associative exploration of meaning there is also a backto-front sense that we are putting metaphors before meaning. We do not begin with a message but with half a metaphor, a domain of meaning that has been stretched beyond its normal frame of reference so that it may trawl some new semantic substance. Cox and Theilgaard (1987), see metaphor as an instrument of psychotherapy exactly because it can capture and draw up ill-formulated thoughts and suppressed memories. For Cox and Theilgaard, a subject’s emotional world can be ‘contained, changed or consolidated’ by the use of poetic imagery (1987: 18). Dead metaphors or those that have become part of normal language use are superficially mundane or ‘faded’, yet they can suddenly be vested with significance as when a patient apologises for being late because a dentist has been taking their ‘crowns’ off and the therapist asks: 15

How many crowns have you had? Are you talking about teeth? I’m talking about crowns (ibid.: 105).

And the therapist can then start to explore the significance of a ‘crown’ to the patient, perhaps returning to its dental referent or by playing with its other associated meanings in order to trawl for the thoughts that a subject may need to express. The teacher can also focus on this casual emergence of meaning in an off-hand remark in order to help students track chains of associations. The associations will not only loosen students’ thoughts and trigger the language in which to express them, but may also help to explore the webs of meaning out of which a language has been constructed. In this way, a teacher can use a conceptual metaphor such as ‘up is happy’ to introduce language for describing positive states of mind (on top of the world, on an up and so on).

46 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher:

‘Where are you going?’ ‘I change.’ ‘Why?’ ‘This chair is broken.’ ‘Sit on the floor!’ ‘Funny …’ (not amused) ‘Why don’t you want to sit on the floor?’ ‘It is dirty.’ ‘Being down is dirty, being down is in the dirt, being down is dirty.’

We then drew a graph that rose and fell across the board with ‘down in the dumps’ at its bottom point and ‘on top of the world’ at the top. After asking students to describe their mood we indicated where it fell on the graph. A next phase was to plot their moods throughout the year. The conceptual metaphor brings order to an idiomatic and superficially chaotic area of language. It also becomes the means through which students can explore their own memories. Thus, the metaphor guides them into a language’s conceptual core and fosters an emotional identification with it. The use of metaphor as an artistic device indicates its capacity to have an emotional impact and its association with ‘affect’. Both the cognitivist and substitutive accounts of metaphor have been criticised for how they stress the role of metaphor in the creation of meaning but underemphasise how it withdraws words from their habitual sense (Ankersmit, 1993). Yet this withdrawal of a term from one meaning is a function of its capacity to entrap another. There is a tempting parallelism between this assault on the distinctiveness of a meaning and the nature of ‘affect’ itself. Simon (1982: 336–7) characterised affect as diffuse and difficult to classify when measured against the precision of cognitive operations upon ‘strings’ of ‘symbols’. It is as if metaphor, in suggesting an assault upon the security of the symbol, is symptomatic of a wider assault by ‘affect’ or emotion upon the integrity of cognitive operations. Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) trainers have shown some understanding of this. They treat learning and our receptivity to it as a product of personal change, and try to achieve personal change through what are called submodalities. Submodalities are features in our environment that exert an unconscious effect upon us. They are the things that we do not notice until they change. They may be the mental pictures that an individual constructs of particular concepts; they could also be the unconscious response to such factors in the immediate environment

Using Figurative Language 47

as the colour of a room ( James, 1994). Gordon (1978) named such representations, ‘metaphors’, and saw an instrument of therapy as arising from their manipulation and change. In this vein, Buckalew and Ross (1981) conducted a study in how the effectiveness of a placebo can be changed by the manner in which a subject sees its packaging (James, 1994). The presentation of the placebo is thus a metaphor of its potential effect, exerting unconscious influence over the patient. We can see this if we examine how treatments in early medicine were constructed not according to an analysis of their effect, but as a response to the metaphors through which sickness is described. Thus patients were bled to ‘purge’ the disease and its impurities, or the insane were trepanned or had holes drilled in their skulls in order to release the demons lodged within. Perceptions change when the metaphors change, as both Schön (1963) and Khun (1970 and 1993) have pointed out. In this spirit, a core NLP strategy is therefore to try to change the metaphors through which a given task is perceived in order to help a learner construct a more receptive attitude towards it. In language teaching and learning this can help students to express their perception of themselves as language learners. Their perceptions can then be shifted by such techniques as anchoring, where they anchor their perception to a different, perhaps more positive construction. A student who is poor at presentation will thus envisage themselves as the presenter they admire. Using a technique called modelling they take a strong presenter as a model, then role-play them. Anchoring suggests a motivated reconstruction of how we perceive a particular idea or phenomenon. We rework the metaphors through which the idea is expressed in order to understand it differently. Yet to embark on such an enterprise one must first make learners into more willing and intuitive users of metaphor. Memories can act as a medium for this type of expression because they place the individual inside an episode that is divorced from collective experience. The uniqueness of the memory and its associated sensations sets up a strong expressive need. When language is shifted away from its inherited meanings towards those which serve the particularities of an individual in a given set of circumstances, then metaphor will arise. With this in mind, I have asked students to close their eyes and look for early memories, to trace out the details of the scene and to remember how it sounded and how it smelt. One response was plain and univocal: Student: ‘I was walking with my mother. There was a path. The path was very long and I was tired. I wanted to go into my mother’s back.’

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I drew a box on the board with a figure going inside it while putting another leaning against the outside. I wrote underneath the box: ‘Into or onto?’ and obtained ‘onto my mother’s back’. There was then an exchange about how in the student’s country at that time a mother would carry a child in a sling on her back. Therefore using ‘go into’ was not so much a misunderstanding of a preposition as a literal attempt to convey a cultural practice. It was only later that I realised how this was an interesting instance of a cultural impact upon the category ‘back’. The ‘back’ was being schematised as an extended vehicle for the child (Holme, 2002). Next, I asked: ‘What was the path like?’ The student hesitated before replying: ‘There was a wood’. I asked the rest of the class to pause and to try to visualise the scene with the wood and to complete it in their imagination. I then turned to another student and asked them to add to the scene. They said that the sun had just set, that the child was worried about getting home before dark. The child was also afraid of the sounds in the wood. I listed some words for sounds: ‘the creak of branches, the rustle of leaves on the path, the hooting of an owl, the growl of a big cat’. The class began to concentrate. Seated in a horseshoe pattern they hunched forward as if focusing upon some central point from which I had withdrawn. Another student took the scene forward, but this time made a graphic use of metaphor, using an it-was-as-if structure that had been taught on another occasion: Student: ‘It was as if I was alone in a wild place.’ Teacher: ‘The jungle?’ But another student objected that the child was with her mother and would not be left alone. Another agreed but acknowledged that such fears may often worry children. The class modified the metaphor and, after correction, produced: ‘it was fear of being alone in a wild place’. Another student added that this made them hope that the mother would pick them up and take them safely home. I moved the lesson onto the next stage, asking the class to listen with eyes closed while I adlibbed an embellished account of the class’s collective memory. Teachers who take even a moderately affective approach to their work will already understand how such memories find language in students which they did not know they had. This motivates further acquisition by opening up areas of meaning that their competence cannot express. Such meanings achieve expression in a dialogue between student and teacher. Another version of this lesson in widening the teacher–learner

Using Figurative Language 49 ‘It was as if I was about to be left alone in a strange and dark place.’

Path

Wood

Sunset

Figure 2.2 Blackboard diagram: ‘strange and dark place’ as a metonym for ‘path’, ‘wood’ and ‘sunset’

dialogue involves making the memory collective, as if to give the class itself a sense of emergence from a common past. Although false, such collective memories express some shared reflection on a persona that has been discarded with the assumption of the role of a more confident learner, of the persona that began the class. The forging of a common class-memory builds the larger metaphor of the group who grow into language together. In this exercise, the memory did not evoke metaphor in a straightforward way. A place was described univocally, as a ‘a wood’, ‘a path’, ‘a sunset’. But such univocalism is deceptive. The description works because the referents function as metonyms which evoke a larger schema of place. The schemas combine as our construction of a described place. A more metaphorical ‘it ⫹ be ⫹ as if’ structure described the more abstract relationship of the individual to a place and point in time. A week later and with the same class, I acknowledged this metonymic pattern but related it back to a speech figure with the ‘tree-type’ diagram shown in Figure 2.2. The idea was that the figure of speech should evoke the metonyms around which the description had been built, and the metonyms should in their turn become a means to rebuild the description through the other elements they evoked and bring back the language. Thus, path was extended through words such as ‘winding’, ‘narrow’, ‘dark’ and ‘long’. I wanted the students to say nothing but to let their minds track back freely over the language that was evoked. I then asked the class to treat the experience in the class as a common memory and to try to rebuild it in small groups, as if it belonged to them. At the end the students said they were surprised by the clarity of the recollection. ‘I think this happened to me’, one said. Bringing back the class memory also brought back the language that had expressed it.

Layering Memories may lead to metaphor through language that is apparently univocal but actually metonymic. A more direct route may be by

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actually trying to express the material world not in terms of its creatures and objects, but through the impact they have upon us. A technique that attempts this is called layering. Layering involves the superimposition of one form of description upon another. It is the enforced rendering of one thing in terms that differ from those in which they might be normally expressed. For this, I have used reproductions of paintings or copies of evocative photographs. Thus, I gave a student a picture and told them to describe its emotional impact without referring to anything that was actually represented. While one student was making this description, the rest of the class tried to imagine the picture that had triggered the student’s response. They tried to visualise the emotions that this student had seen. When the description was complete, one or two students described the picture that they had visualised. An early mistake with this activity was to ‘go in cold’. An advanced student was given a picture and asked to describe it in the way suggested. If they understood the activity, which was not always the case, their descriptions would be extremely limited and often turn around a few abstractions, some of which would be repeated, as they felt unable to advance beyond a few basic concepts. I tried to remedy this problem when I repeated the activity more recently with a class of international university students doing some general conversation. I used a reproduction of Delacroix’s extraordinary painting: ‘Arab on horseback attacked by a lion’. The picture is evocative of movement and terror, with the lion seeming to be about to lift the horse from underneath and topple the rider who strikes downwards with his sword. The background suggests a swirl of dust that seems to draw all things into itself imperilling the individuality of lion, horse and rider in a single vortex of fury. This time, students were given the opportunity to visualise a single emotion before they had to express a larger and emotionally confused picture. I wrote ‘Power’ on the board and the class were asked to say what the word made them think of. Most produced the very common metaphor of ‘Power is money’. Evidence, if any were needed, of how students resort to metaphor to explore meaning. Since one abstraction was being likened to another, one class member was asked to elaborate on how they visualised ‘money’. They showed reluctance to engage the subject in an extended manner and simply said ‘business’, then ‘big business’. I asked them to make a mental picture of ‘power’ then to describe it. One student came up with ‘New York’. I asked them to describe New York. The student confessed they had never been there. Untruthfully, I said I had never been there either, but could still describe the city. I asked

Using Figurative Language 51

them to imagine they were in New York. The first student then talked about ‘huge buildings’, ‘lots of people’ and I rearticulated these phrases as ‘tall buildings, skyscrapers and bustling crowds’, writing the appropriate phrases on the board. I wrote ‘Fear’ on the board. Somewhat defensively, one student claimed that they never felt fear. However, they made a clear and common association between two ideas, ‘fear’ and ‘death’, when they said they were young and never thought about death. I said that fear for me was an aircraft that had lost one engine. I described looking out of the window and seeing a progressive loss of altitude. With the sentence ‘fear is an aeroplane that has lost an engine’, I cued a metaphor. Other class members took up the pattern. One said that fear was a snake, and recalled how she had nearly stepped on one while walking in a wood in her native Japan. Three other associations were: Fear is exams. Fear is waking up in England (because the weather is always bad). Fear is a walk home at night. The most interesting response came from a Korean student who said that fear was speaking at a seminar. He recalled how recently he had been asked to say something about postmodernism and the construction of feminism in Middle Eastern society. He recounted how he understood the topic perfectly and had come to the seminar better prepared than many of his peers. However, when his politics tutor had invited him to contribute to the discussion, he had simply been unable to speak. After 20 seconds of silence he had had to apologise and say he could not contribute. I asked him to say what he would have said, and he gave a very clear account of how postmodernism viewed feminism as ‘socially constructed’ and through techniques of deconstruction offered insights into how that notion was composed and could then be perceived from an alternative perspective. I asked him why he had felt afraid when he could clearly articulate things so well. A student from Spain further reinforced this message of surprise when she said that he spoke better than anybody else in the class. I used this as a pretext to let him lead the main activity, gave him the Delacroix picture and asked him to describe it without referring to anything in it. He did this with an unusual confidence and a strong sense of what the activity was about. He spoke of a sense of confusion and conflict. I supplied the word ‘struggle’ and stressed how this might apply to a conflict where the outcome was uncertain. He said there was a struggle

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and spoke of a feeling of fear. He then talked of ‘darkness’ and things that were ‘obscure’. Finally, he produced a standard metaphor that had clearly been memorised as a ‘chunk’ from some other context. He talked of ‘walking along the edge of catastrophe’. Whether or not the students had built very different visualisations of the picture was difficult to determine. With one exception, they all focused on a war scene and talked particularly of the casualties and of the dead. The exception was an account of a picture of famine where the student described a confusion of people against a desert background. The Delacroix picture itself surprised the class when they saw it. None had considered the animal contest that was depicted. Without explicit reference to the notion of a metaphor, the activity had involved the metaphor-based process of articulating abstract concepts through visual images. An exploration had begun of how we explore what we feel through what we see. An implicitly metaphorical process of articulating one type of domain through another had also been initiated. A stage where students were denied recourse to the concrete references they had before them had forced a more extensive exploration of their own abstract vocabulary. Perhaps most interesting was how when taken as a whole such activities can push learner language in a multitude of different thematic directions. Issues raised varied from the description of a metropolis to a discussion of the fear of speaking in a foreign language in a formal setting.

Metaphors looking for a meaning Building a metaphorical response to metaphor can also promote a student’s ownership of their reading. Critical literacy has this ownership as an objective. For example, even from an early age, children can be asked to propose different endings to a story; they are no longer the narrative’s willing victim but an agent in its construction. By achieving that agency they can wonder why the established ending is as it is, questioning the social order that it upholds. Older students can take texts that argue a position then restructure them as a dialogue that gives an opposing point of view. In a narrative they can become a voice that argues for different treatment by the author. Metaphor also offers critical literacy and language teachers a mechanism to help students control their reading by understanding how they can shape its meanings. Metaphor can be an affective or emotional trigger that promotes the idea of reading as a dialogue where meaning arises from a negotiation between the student and the text.

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Barry Kanpol (1999: 104) wanted to challenge the determinism of the sociologist Jean Anyon (1980, 1981) and his view that children’s attitudes to abstract terms such as ‘knowledge’ would reflect their class bias. According to Anyon, lower-to-middle-class children would see ‘knowledge’ as ‘to get the right answer’, and upper-class children as ‘to be creative, to think’. The answers were held to be a predictor of social mobility. ‘Getting the right answer’ suggests a life of punching in the right data, ‘creative thought’ a willingness to rise to the challenge of management problems. Kanpol helped to expand children’s view of the term, ‘Knowledge’, by exposing them to their own very different definitions. If they said ‘knowledge’ was ‘being smart’ then they would have to consider what smart meant, opening their understanding of that word until it started to incorporate a sense of an intelligence that would ‘stretch’ itself to accommodate new approaches to problems. Metaphor offers a more intuitive vehicle through which teachers can expand then personalise a learner’s construction of a word. This can be done by oscillating back and forth between an opening and often banal metaphor, and the secondary metaphor that this has produced: Teacher: ‘Knowledge is … ?’ Student: ‘Power?’ Teacher: ‘Don’t ask me. It’s what you say it is. And power is … ?’ Student: ‘to control people.’ Teacher: ‘So knowledge is controlling people, and that is good?’ Student: ‘Knowledge is good power and bad power.’ As the word is extended through a cascade of subsidiary metaphors, the learner starts to take possession of its meaning. Because poetic metaphor detaches words from their normal domain of meaning, it allows the reader greater licence to reshape those meanings in their own way. Literature teachers or language teachers who use poems may therefore want to encourage readers to stop ferreting after what they think the poet wanted to say and to spend more time hunting down the meanings that the poem triggers within them. A way to do this would be to detach some of the metaphors from the context of the poem and treat them as isolated elements that release the student’s own sets of associations. A while ago, I published an activity that helped teachers to do exactly this (Holme, 1991). The procedure involved extricating the metaphors from their context and restoring them to their literal meaning. The poem I used was from Macbeth’s ‘candle’ speech.

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I tried this activity again when teaching on a gloomy evening during the rainy season in Central Africa, in the Republic of Congo. I told the class they would look at a poem at the end of the session but would first consider what it was about. As a start they were asked to think hard about ‘a candle’. They were to think of how they saw this object. One student talked about a candle in a bottle and the bottle collecting wax. Another mentioned a candle burning on a box when there was no electricity. I asked them to focus hard upon this mental image of a candle on a box in a darkened room. I wanted to point to the middle of the students’ semicircle and say the candle was there. But the seats were benches anchored to the floor in rows. Instead, I asked them to look forward at the candle burning on my desk. A student objected that there was no candle there. I insisted there was and said look at it. I asked the class to stare into its flame for a few seconds and let their minds follow wherever their thoughts led them. I asked of nobody in particular: ‘What are you thinking about?’ A student talked about life being ‘not long’. Death so often touches even young people’s experience in Central Africa that, rightly or wrongly, I flinched at dwelling on this further and moved the class on by asking why a flame made them think of this. One answered to the effect that it was because he could extinguish it. Next, I asked them to think of a shadow moving across a floor. They were again asked to describe what they felt and saw. One linked the shadow to a flickering candle and said that they saw the silhouette of the flame as if on a wall. Another student felt a feeling of threat and joked, melodramatically, of a sudden shadow falling across the floor. I used the mention of a floor to introduce the word ‘creaking’ and made the appropriate sound. I next asked them to think of an actor creaking restlessly across the floor of a stage. I paused, then again asked the class what they were thinking of. I got no response. The actor was not an evocative figure. At that time, I was myself rehearsing a part in an amateur production. The part was in French and I was finding learning the lines more difficult than I had imagined. In miming the actor I mimed myself with a text walking up and down trying to learn lines. One student said I was revising. (In this town, Brazzaville, street and domestic lighting were far from universal and in order to work at night students would often cluster on the road near the airport where there was a battery of street lamps.) I wondered if there was a feeling of desperation about all this learning and pacing and somebody replied that exams made them feel desperate but this was not why they walked up and down.

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In order to introduce the next image, I asked the class if they could remember any particular instances of story-telling; in that culture, a ritualised and entertaining use of spoken language was still common. One student mentioned the name of another who was not in the class but who was particularly well-known for his humorous narratives. The next step was to ask them to focus upon an even greater kind of narrative failure, where a story was reduced to a meaningless and furious idiocy. In order to put the previous reference out of mind, I suggested that they should not think of someone whose stories were inept, so much as incoherent or meaningless. However, the class appeared to be fixed upon characters directly known to them and a joke was made about a peer who was notorious for not making sense. I remembered a picture in a school history book and described it. The picture showed a wizened sailor telling tales on the beach to a boy. I said that I often identified the cadences of an idiot’s story with those of storms at sea. I explained how I thought of stories reduced to a meaningless and battering noise. Such a furious sound made me think of the mad. The evocation of the sea was not vivid in that setting as some of the students knew only the river. However, I contextualised the theme by asking the students to think for a few moments about the worst storm that they had experienced. I asked one of the more articulate members of the class to recount his thoughts. The student recalled a journey he had made back to their village during the rainy season. A swollen river had ploughed a gully through the road and stopped the traffic. He described sitting in a roadside hut that had filled up with people as several other vehicles had come to a halt at this impasse. I asked the students to imagine the sounds of the storm. A storm had just passed and a description came easily. Other students soon began to talk about thunder and rain on the tin roof under which their classmate had waited with other stranded passengers. I inserted a lot of new vocabulary related to the description of sound. Two ideas fused and I asked the students to think of a madman trying to shout out a story against the background noise of the storm. Time was short, the students were given a copy of the poem and I read it to them aloud while they followed the text. I then asked them to read it silently to themselves: … Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale

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Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. (Shakespeare, Macbeth) Finally, I asked them to reflect on the words ‘signifying nothing’, leaving the class to its silence. This technique began by treating the poem as a series of metaphorical triggers that would encourage the students to explore their own thoughts. By first decontextualising the poem’s metaphors, I invited the class to chase the many ideas that these images released when they were not constrained by the poem’s overarching purpose. They could thus assert ownership of its content. These images ranged from existential thoughts to anecdotes about acquaintances, childhood memories and other incidents. The final reading of the poem as a sequence of metaphors restored to it the power to structure thought. The loose structure of the class was brought to a conclusive order by the tighter structure of the poem.

Conclusions In this chapter I have brought our attention back to live metaphor. I thought how we could encourage a more creative approach to meaning in the classroom so that this might result in a more expressive use of language and thus an enhancement of the language knowledge. My interest in how we might extend categories led to a consideration of how categories were built. I saw categories as radial and sometimes lacking in any core unifying principle (Lakoff, 1987). I suggested that we could describe metaphor as a form of category creation, with one domain of meaning being subsumed into another to create something new. This raised the problem of how we can manipulate and control such categories. As a solution I put forward Lakoff’s (1987) argument that the manner in which we control such extensible categories was typified by another figurative use of language, metonymy. For the teacher, the following conclusions could be drawn: 1 One route towards a metaphorical use of language may lie in a full understanding of the nature of the associated meanings on which metaphor depends. I found students ready to explore these associations and use them to stimulate the production of metaphor. 2 The affective power of metaphor connects our construction of the world to our emotional existence. Its capacity to personalise meaning

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offers a way to help students make the language they must learn to use into an expression of what they want to say. In other words, it shows us how we should not treat a target language (TL) as a set of prefabricated texts in which students are invited to take up a temporary and often ill-suited residency. It proposes the TL as material that will respond to the student’s own design. 3 The metonymies through which we control categories may be culturally constructed. Such cultural biases need to be understood because they suggest that languages do not always operate with equivalent meanings. Explorations of categories and the metonyms that evoke and express them can promote the classroom as a forum for cross-cultural interaction. A further point concerns the impact of these types of learning upon lesson planning. More than ever, I have become aware how teacher development is in part an escape from the linear lesson plans with which teacher-training begins. PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) methodology still steers language teaching even though it has moved on from the behaviourist era in which that training was rooted; such methods were evolved from military training procedures. Pedagogical procedures that treat a language as functional or grammatical weapon parts destined for mechanical assemblage leave students no understanding of how linguistic components interact in the unfolding process of meaning negotiation across contexts. Military metaphors once infected business, producing corporate command and control structures, the corporate HQ and the Sales Force (Morgan, 1997). They also steered training methods, resulting in ‘drills’, conditioned responses to ‘commands’ and learning ‘objectives’ that are more positions to be overcome rather than a prospect to be attained. Now the corporation is the dominant global organisation, and it is therefore corporate metaphors that infect military organisations and education making teachers into agents who ‘add value’, achieve curriculum ‘targets’ and are subject to ‘quality control’ or ‘assessment’. Yet language-learning is neither a sales pitch nor a military campaign. It is the negotiation of a web of associated meanings, identities and cultures. It involves the perception of a wider semantic and cultural geography, not the isolation of a few of its landmarks as the targets one is trying to attain. Hence, there is a growing interest in ethnomethodology, and the development of a reflective approach to the classroom as it is founded upon the principles of qualitative action research (see for example Byram, Esarte-Sarries and Taylor, 1991; Richards and Lockhart, 1996).

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Our interest is in the larger and more detailed texture of classroom encounters and less in the achievement of specific objectives. Such principles can also redirect our concept of planning, making teachers aware that they can plan classes not as ‘structures’ but as ‘semi-structures’, or as a series of prompts to the wider exploration of the linguistic landscape in which a given form is grounded. The class experiences also underscored the key point that metaphor should not be taught as language that is shorn of affective power. Metaphor can help a student to mentally fix language as if around the moment of its significance to them.

3 Teaching the Language and Structure of Metaphor

The last chapter looked at how we can encourage a more creative attitude to language among students. In doing so, it took the traditional view that metaphor represented a different or unusual use of language, and used this assumption to encourage students to play more freely with meanings. That play was constructed around a copula model of metaphor. A copula metaphor is one constructed using the copula verb, ‘be’ or ‘become’ in English. Thus ‘Juliet is the sun’ or ‘Beauty is a flower’ are copula metaphors. I used this kind of metaphor because it is useful for revealing the properties of all other types, both to teachers and students. But there are three main problems with treating copula metaphors as central or prototypical: ● ●

●

they are rare relative to other kinds of metaphor; they may falsify our conception of metaphor by using an atypical form to identify how metaphor works and what it consists of; and many languages cannot make copula metaphors because they do not have a copula verb, yet metaphor itself is universal.

The first problem is that even in a copula language such as English, copula metaphors are probably not common. Brooke-Rose (1958) and Cameron (1997) in an examination of spoken data, found that, in English, verb metaphors occur more frequently than the noun type. The most explicit form of noun metaphor is the copula metaphor, but it is not the only form, and this further confirms its rarity. Copula metaphors identify the topic as a subject, and a vehicle as a complement. But the topic and vehicle can only rarely be given a grammatical identity in this way, since many metaphorical sentences do not have a topic that can be identified in the lexis (MacCormac, 1985). 59

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Also, we need to remember that many languages do not possess a copula and there is no equivalence in the way copulas are used across the languages that possess them. Chinese and Arabic are two major languages that do not have copulas. Arabic does construct meanings that even without a copula can be similar to those found in English, whilst Chinese, on the other hand, would sound strange if it were to construct a similar phrase without the addition of a conjunction to indicate that a metaphor is meant. In other words, we would need an equivalent phrase to ‘like’ in order to build the metaphor ‘Lee is a lion’ (Jin, 1995: personal communication). In this chapter I am going to look at the problems that arise when we take our analysis of metaphor beyond the copula form and study how it occurs in language. I will give the teacher an idea of the many and diverse ways in which metaphor can occur in language. Because almost any extended use of language can be metaphorical, I will argue that identifying metaphor according to a set of formal linguistic features is unlikely to be fruitful. This reinforces the argument that metaphor should be identified as a cognitive phenomenon rather than as a linguistic one. For the teacher this will not be a complete release from the strictures of form. There are ways that language marks metaphor and these must be discussed and perhaps taught. We will also consider what these forms tell us about the basis of metaphor in cognition, then develop the classroom implications of that study.

Metaphor and parts-of-speech Not only are verb metaphors more common than the noun type, they also show clearly how a topic and vehicle are not always expressed in language (MacCormac, 1985). Consider 17, below: 17

The tall ships nodded as they passed by. (author’s data)

It is clear that the word ‘nodded’ is not literal, because ships do not ‘nod’ when they pass each other, although the rocking of the ship’s masts approximates to the movement of a ‘head’. We might interpret this as: ●

Source domain (movement of the head) → Target domain (the swaying of the ship)

where ‘→’ means ‘maps to’. But there is no way of knowing if the metaphor really begins and ends with the verb. In order to understand the non-literal meaning of ‘nod’ we might have to think of the ship as like a person; that the passing of two ships

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is like the passing of two people who nod greetings before going on their way. Although there may be a metaphorical focus on a particular part of speech, in this case a verb, there is no clear idea as to whether the metaphor begins and ends here. Thus, the following interpretation is also arguable: ●

Source domain (the nodding of two people as they walk past each other) → Target domain (the swaying of two ships as they sail past each other)

Schön (1993) refers to the capability of metaphors to generate a narrative. This narrative also pushes the metaphor beyond the parts of speech in which it first resides. For 17, the narrative is of two people passing each other and, perhaps, a gesture of recognition or greeting. Then, for me, there is a larger evocation of a rural world in which strangers still acknowledge each other. Different people will construct different narratives. The greater the detail of the narrative, then the greater will be the scope for individual divergences. One can also build the narrative by extending the metaphor out from its focal point, the verb, towards the other terms that it affects. Such narratives can encourage students to explore a metaphor and its associated lexis more deeply than might normally be the case: Teacher: Student 1: Student 2: Teacher:

Students: Teacher: Student 2: Teacher: Student 3: Teacher: Student 2:

(reads) ‘his flat feet sucking at the stones.’ (Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast) ‘What does sucking make you think of?’ (an embarrassed shrug and a self-conscious glance at some of his classmates) ‘A baby.’ (regretting their choice of word) ‘OK, but when you drown, the water sucks you down. That’s not so nice, is it. Are the stones sucking him down?’ (no reply) ‘Here, the feet are sucking at the stones, not the stones at the feet.’ ‘The feet are sucking up the stones like porridge.’ (reading the complete metaphor) ‘What kind of person is Swelter?’ (the description is about the movement of a character called Swelter) ‘A big fat cook.’ ‘Greedy. A big fat greedy cook who sucks everything into him.’ ‘A baby!’

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And thus one builds a class narrative about an emptiness that is forever trying to satiate itself. It is narrative that not only encourages a deeper interpretation of a text, but which chains lexis together in a more memorable set of associations. To construct the narrative we should discard our sense of metaphor as residing in a particular area of a sentence. A given source domain can also be evoked through an adjective. Look at 18 and 19, below: 18 19

He looked well-seasoned. (author’s data) We heard a colourful song.

Arguably, sentence 18 works as a metaphor because ‘well-seasoned’ would normally collocate with ‘timber’. We are thus comparing a male person to some of the attributes of an elided noun, timber. In this way, an adjective or adjectival phrase can also take on a metaphorical meaning by modifying a noun it would not normally describe. Sentence 19 is also an example of a synaesthetic metaphor. A song is heard but is described, here, as if it were seen. Adjective metaphors that are synaesthetic can help students build the lexis with which to describe their sense experiences. Normally, we might approach the lexis of perception sense by sense, exploring sound one day, touch the next. Another way is to start with one type of perception and see how well its adjectives extend to others. A teacher might bring a cushion to the class in order to teach the meaning of ‘soft’; then make a loud noise followed by one that is almost inaudible. They might then prompt the students to describe the noise by pushing in the cushion. They can stretch the metaphor to a less common metaphor, contrasting harsh colours with softer tones. Students can construct a chart where extensions are common, less common, remote but possible, and odd or impossible as in Figure 3.1. Synaesthetic metaphor chart On

Conventional

Less common

Plausible

Odd

Soft touch

Soft sound

Soft light

Soft scent

Soft taste

Harsh feeling

Harsh light Harsh sound

Harsh smell

Harsh taste

Cold touch

Cold colour

Cold sound Cold taste

Cold smell

Figure 3.1 Exploring the language of sense perception

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Thus one can begin by thinking of different things that we feel, hear, see or taste, then see how well the meaning carries to other sense experiences. Teacher: ‘A Kashmir sweater.’ Student: ‘A soft feeling.’ Teacher: (whispering) ‘A whisper.’ Student: ‘A soft sound.’ Teacher: ‘Pale blue.’ Student: ‘A soft blue.’ After extending the language of the senses, students can listen to passages of music and describe what they hear, look at pictures and describe their response, or imagine a perfect room and then describe it. A metaphor can also reside in an adverb as in 20 below: 20

She swore blindly.

The adverb metaphor again shows the problem of knowing quite where a metaphorical effect begins and ends. The subject, ‘she’, is by implication blinded by their action in order to swear as one who will not be distracted by the sight of events that run contrary to what they assert. Therefore the topic of this sentence might be ‘she’ and the vehicle, ‘a blind person’, as in ‘she is a blind person’. Even ‘swear’ is part of the metaphor, giving a topic ‘she’, and a vehicle ‘a blind person who swears’. This argues, once again, that metaphor is best perceived as the linguistic representation of a cognitive process because when we look at it as linguistic we cannot find where in language it resides. For the teacher, verb, adverb and adjective metaphors raise ways of stretching figurative language-use beyond a more basic copula form. Such activities provide a useful way to spend 10 or 15 minutes of class time in building vocabulary. One might begin with metaphor at its most obvious: Teacher: ‘For Romeo, Juliet is the sun. So what does the sun do?’ Student: (puzzled) ‘The sun shines …?’ Teacher: ‘Yes, it shines; and Juliet is the sun, so Juliet …?’ The teacher tries to use the isomorphic properties of the metaphor. What is true for the source domain is entailed in the target domain: Student: ‘ah Juliet shines.’ Teacher: ‘Juliet shines on … Who does Juliet shine on … ?’

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Student: ‘Romeo.’ Teacher: ‘Juliet shines on Romeo. When the sun shines in your eyes, it dazzles you.’ Student: ‘Dazzles?’ Teacher: ‘The sun shines in my eyes. I am dazzled’ (moving their hands in front of their eyes) ‘… dazzled. So Juliet’s sun shines on Romeo, and Juliet … ’ Student: ‘dazzles … ’ Teacher: ‘Dazzles Romeo. Juliet dazzles Romeo with her love. Can Romeo see?’ Student: ‘No.’ Teacher: ‘So Romeo is blind. How does Romeo love?’ Student: (no response) Teacher: ‘How does he love? He loves blind … ’ Student: ‘blindly.’ And the teacher now starts to repeat the longer sequence, then stretches the sequence again or turns it back and looks at other properties of the sun, turning from a vocabulary of light and sight to one of heat and warmth, for example. This can encourage the class to explore metaphors that are appropriate and inappropriate: Teacher: ‘The sun warms … So Juliet … ’ Student: ‘warms Romeo.’ (laughs) Teacher: ‘She’s not a radiator. “Warms his heart, perhaps”, no, “fills the world with her warmth”, maybe. Sometimes the sun’s too hot and it … ’ Student: ‘Burns.’ Teacher: ‘So Romeo will get burnt, or scorched.’ Student: ‘What is scorched?’ In this way the students tease out a longer metaphor from the narrative and learn other lexis through memorable sets of associations. The teacher can then ask students to hunt for metaphors in text and see how they can be stretched. Often metaphors are already stretched, affecting an entire phrase or clause. Adjuncts are words, phrases or clauses that add information to a sentence which is not contained in its main clause. Metaphors will also extend to whole adjuncts (Goatly, 1997): 21 I consider we are making a real sacrifice when we decide to break a lance with these opponents. (Karl Marx)

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The metaphor is one of jousting. Marx is saying that a revolutionary movement should not become overly distracted by the need to take on the petty instruments of bourgeois power such as police and justices of the peace. The breaking of the lance signifies wasting effort in a conflict or ‘joust’ with such targets when we should be focusing on the real objective of fostering proletarian revolution. The fact that the entire clause is metaphorical means that we have to find the topic of the metaphor through context. Metaphors can also extend throughout an entire sentence. Gibbs (1994: 213) calls these sentential metaphors. Such metaphors may also be implicit. Thus, if we hear ‘The guard dog growled’ when we can see a security guard but no dog, we will assume the reference is to a noise made by the guard. The metaphor is created by a disjunction between the ‘dog’s’ current referent and the concept to which it conventionally refers. We will also understand that if the guard performs other dog-like actions, these cannot be interpreted as literal, either. In example 22, ‘the slime’ refers to a person’s ingratiating talk: 22 He kept speaking in the same ingratiating tone. Somehow, the slime oozed into our resistant thoughts. Yet the topic is outside the sentence. The metaphor thus acts as a cohesive device, though in conventional Hallidayan (1985) terminology it would probably be called a ‘paraphrase’, with ‘slime’ paraphrasing speech. A common use of sentential metaphors can be found in proverbs, which are finally sentential metaphors where the topic exists only in the context to which they are made to refer (Goatly, 1997): 23 24

Too many cooks spoil the broth. A stitch in time saves nine.

Both of these statements could have been uttered in a workshop by mechanics repairing a car. The topic of 23 could have been the number of mechanics trying to repair the same car and how there were too many of them. The topic of 24 could have been a worn bolt that had been replaced before it broke and caused greater damage. Yet these topics would have been inferred out of a context rather than stated. Proverbs are idioms in the sense that they are expressions that use figurative language or metaphor in a repeated way to represent an agreed meaning. Yet unlike all idioms, proverbs sum up some truth about the world and are transparent in a way that allows us to apply them to series of different but similar situations.

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Proverbs are ready-to-wear vehicles available to dress any appropriate topic. The topic for ‘cooks spoiling the broth’ could be a garage with too many mechanics. For the stitching it could be replacing a tired rivet in a mechanical device. What is clear also is that the proverb is not applicable to a situation because stitches are like rivets or mechanics like cooks. It is applicable because of the fact that sowing torn cloth will prevent the tear getting larger just as replacing a rivet will prevent the mechanical defect from getting worse. In short, the proverb can be applied to a given situation because it unfolds parallel argument. Glucksberg and Keysar (1993) call these shared arguments, a relational structure. Proverbs are common sets of circumstances that our culture gives to us as available to generalise about other sets of circumstance with which they have a common relational structure. The metaphor preexists the state of affairs or meaning it will name. Drew and Holt (1995) have shown how proverbs are often used to close conversations; they are part of the stock of language that is held in order to consign a state of affairs to a category of shared and cyclical experience. They protect us from the threatening rarity of an event by finding within it a structure or sequence that corresponds to our common experience. In the last chapter, I looked at how one can ask students to explore whether they can translate idioms in order to find appropriate expressions for a given situation. Proverbs lend themselves to this; teachers can invite students to think about proverbs by providing them with a list of them and suggesting that they first match the proverb to the appropriate situation, as in Table 3.1. The literal meaning of the proverb must first be clarified; students then group and match. This rarely causes problems but can produce lively discussion. In a second phase students develop parallel situations, describe them, then ask other students which proverb they illustrate. A given use of language is appropriate for a given grouping of contexts. The contexts are grouped by the fact of their being analogous, or sharing common underlying structures. Inventing, grouping and rejecting situations according to whether they share such structures is exactly what students are doing in this exercise. As such they are exploring a process that goes far beyond the quite rare use of proverbs.

Metaphors that identify themselves: grammatical metaphor If metaphor cannot be confined to particular forms of language use, we might ask whether it is entirely without linguistic properties. Yet one mode of analysis has rejected this conclusion and has also made some

The Language and Structure of Metaphor 67 Table 3.1 Proverb matching Still waters run deep

Your friend has lost their job and now they’ve split up with their partner as well

It never rains but it pours

Because you missed a plane, you met an old friend at the airport

Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

An acquaintance who could do little for herself got a large inheritance then spent it all

A stitch in time saves nine

You have a friend who is always criticising people for doing things that they often do themselves

Too many cooks spoil the broth

You have three friends helping you clear a room and another offers to help

A fool and his money are soon parted

An acquaintance who was so withdrawn that you barely noticed them has just won a ‘young writer of the year’ award. You didn’t even know they wrote

Every cloud has a silver lining

You have to go back over a problem in order to find a way through it

There’s no way up but down

You are trying to calm an impatient friend

He who laughs last laughs least

You repaired a small leak before it became larger

Good things come to those who wait

Four people are trying to write one report and argue so much about what to put in it that it becomes confused and contradictory

Many hands make light work

An acquaintance laughed when a friend wrecked a new car and now they have just damaged their own

interesting observations about the nature of metaphor itself, or about the difference between language that is congruent and not congruent. This is the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) conception of grammatical and lexical metaphor. The SFL view is that a grammar is a product of the meanings that a given language is trying to express. A language itself should be perceived as a representation of the meanings that the members of a given society wish to represent so that they can communicate them to each other. Because a society will also furnish the context in which a given communication occurs and from which its meanings are

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derived, a language and its context are inextricable (Thompson, 1996). A social context and a language affect each other; the social context is structured by language, and structures language in its turn (Lemke, 1995). Language should be analysed as a function of the meaning it is seeking to express (Halliday, 1985). Thus, the grammatical system of a language will be wedded to the expression of different types of meaning. Consider examples 26 and 27: 26 27

I saw him at dawn. I hit him at the end of his shift.

Traditionally, sentence, 26 consists of a subject ‘I’, a verb ‘saw’, an object ‘him’, and a prepositional phrase or adjunct ‘at dawn’. It should also be clear that if we are working in a framework of SFL, or of any traditional grammar, we could deduce the subject from an analysis of the meaning of the sentence. We might look for the part of the sentence that is initiating the action. However, if we look at 27, we notice that this sentence has exactly the same structure: subject, verb, object and prepositional phrase. Yet, we also see that the subject is initiating an action in a much more direct sense than in 26. ‘Hit’ in 27 is clearly an action with a direct physical impact. ‘Saw’ in 26 is not an action at all but a mode of perception. It is realising the function of perception. We can say that the subject in 26 is a senser because it is sensing something that occurs, and that the subject in 27 is an actor because it is accomplishing an action. We can now make a further judgement that a senser will typically be an animate subject. This is because animals have the capacity of seeing, hearing and feeling whereas objects do not. Another SFL term is congruent (Halliday, 1985). Example 26 shows a congruent use of language because a senser is typically an animate creature that senses events and, in this sentence, it is. Equally, ‘saw’ is normally a mental predicator that discovers a ‘phenomenon’ and, here, it is. This usage is congruent because the grammar and the lexis express the communicative goals that they are designed to achieve. According to Halliday (1985), then, congruent language is in some sense ‘natural’; it will closely reflect the physical relationships in which language is grounded. Example 27 (I hit him at the end of his shift) illustrates a clear set of physical events, and the structure of language has evolved in order to express this set of physical relationships. By the same token, this type of congruent language is held to be typical of the speech of children because it reflects the simpler sets of physical relationships that make up their experience (ibid.). According to the SFL view,

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language and context interpenetrate and structure each other. A given context expresses the communicative needs of a group of language users at any one time. As society evolves, it may oblige a given group to communicate messages in ways for which the language’s grammar was not explicitly designed; the context may start to detach language from the set of physical relationships in which language begins. Example 28, below, makes this clear: 28 29

Dawn found him there. He was there at dawn.

Congruently, the verb ‘find’ requires a subject that is a seeker. A seeker should also be an animate being since ‘seeking’ is a function that presupposes the ability to initiate an action. Equally, ‘dawn’, as a time, might normally require a prepositional phrase, or adjunct, such as ‘at dawn’. Accordingly, 29 is a congruent reading of 28. Example 28 departs from congruency because items in it assume grammatical functions they should not normally have. In this case an adjunct becomes a subject, or perhaps a locative subject since it is putting the person in a place. We could therefore call this an adjunct to locative subject metaphor (Downing and Locke, 1992). We can identify some grammatical metaphors through linguistic tests. For example, in 30 we express doubt with a modal verb ‘may’. However, we might also perform this function with the verb ‘think’ as in 31: 30 31 32 33

It may rain. I think it’s going to rain. (Halliday, 1985) I think it’s going to rain, isn’t it? I think of people who are no longer here, don’t I?

If we want to make a question by tagging 31, we have to tag the auxiliary ‘is going’ as in 32. One can argue that this is because ‘think’ is not the main verb, but is operating as a modal. This becomes clear if we look at example 33. In 33 we use a tag that agrees with the verb ‘think’, thus showing it is the main verb. The tag in 33 shows that ‘think’, here, represents the cognitive process which, congruently, it should name. One function common in academic and bureaucratic texts is the disguise of ‘the source of a modality’ in order to ‘make it more difficult to query’ (Thompson, 1996). By this we mean that the narrator may try to hide behind their narrative in order to make it appear that the events or arguments they recount have structured themselves. Sentence 34 is

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a case of nominalisation, where a process, ‘undress’, is used not as a verb but as a noun subject; an instruction is made part of an established order that tries to compel obedience: 34 35

No undressing on the beach, by order. Uncertainties surround the origins of this form.

In 35, attributes, in this case ‘uncertainties’, are not congruent because they operate as an actor in order to disguise authorship and ensure that the text’s assertion cannot be challenged. The text appears not to have been written but to exist as one of the indisputable facts of the universe it is supposed to evoke. In this sense, grammatical metaphor evokes the larger metaphor of the authorless text. Kress (1989) likened such texts to ghost ships, evoking the story of the Marie-Celeste as a craft found in perfect condition but without its crew. The text has just drifted into view, complete and comprehensible but with no author at its helm. Teachers can ask their students to challenge this authorial disguise. Once I asked a class to imagine the hidden author of 34 (No undressing on the beach, by order). I asked them to envisage their home, their appearance, and their daily routine. The class constructed an image of narrowminded respectability and routine-bound tedium. Having evicted the author from his or her concealing narrative, they can argue with them and construct that argument as a narrative. Grammatical metaphor also describes cause and effect. It creates the illusion of events directly impacting upon each other as part of some immutable order unaffected by human observation and intervention: 36 Oil price rises may inflict some damage on the prospects of economic revival in the Far East. 37 Oil prices have risen. Therefore the economic revival in the Far East may not happen as expected. Example 36 is a cause-and-effect statement. One event, ‘a rise in oil prices’, will affect another, ‘economic revival’. Arguably, a congruent representation would require that an event, ‘a rise in oil prices’, would be given a causal linkage to another, ‘economic revival’, giving something like 37, above. The grammatical metaphor is again contained in how a process, ‘rise’, is an actor that is construed as able to ‘damage’ an event. It is also a consequence of the nominalisation of the verb, ‘rise’. Halliday (1993) has suggested that literacy itself has imposed a nominalising ‘pressure’ on language. Literacy can be ascribed a tendency to

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remove language from the physical relationships of the phenomena in which its structures are partially grounded. Written text enables language to transmit messages across space and time, thus removing them from the context that is traditionally shared between a speaker and a hearer. Literacy thus obliges language to do more than convey the context in which it operates. In the world as we perceive it, there seems, for example, to be a natural boundary between ‘actions’ and ‘things’. Actions can only be represented as an effect upon an ‘object’. Objects are indubitably there. Actions and objects therefore have a different status that is encoded in language as verbs and nouns. A grammatically congruent use of language implies that verbs primarily represent actions and nouns primarily represent objects. In 36, above, two actions, ‘rise’ and ‘revive’, impact upon each other without the mediation of objects. They impact upon each other as if they were things. The representation of one process as having a causal impact upon another extricates causal sequences from the world of physical phenomena through which they are manifest. This type of representation is crucial to scientific and most Western philosophical thought. Halliday (1993) therefore contends that scientific literacy has precipitated this kind of tendency. SFL (systemic functional linguistics) scholars also contend that students of language and science find these types of nominalisation difficult to understand because they create a social context that uproots language from its expression of naturally occurring forms and relationships (Halliday, 1993). Therefore, grammatical metaphor is a useful concept if we want to teach students to produce scientific texts. In fact, the use of nominalisation to express cause and effect processes is important not just for students of scientific English, but for any learner who must master the many types of academic discourse that base their authority upon logical arguments. My early interest in grammatical metaphor made me too conscious of form. It led me back towards the use of traditional worksheets where students had to transform two sentences such as are found in 38 into a nominalised one shown in 39: 38 They renegotiated the treaty. They therefore postponed the outbreak of further conflict. 39 The renegotiation of the treaty postponed the outbreak of further conflict. In a subsequent exercise, I tried to explain these types of text as grammatical metaphors and gave colleagues a worksheet prefaced by that

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explanation. My colleagues told me that the notion of grammatical metaphor simply confused the basic idea of nominalisation. Only marginally more interesting was an exercise where students read a larger text and identified the cause-and-effect nominalisations, or grammatical metaphors. They then turned them into congruent language so that they could understand how these forms are often an efficient way to express the argument structures that are central to academic discourse. Example 40 below is an adaptation of an authentic text for some advanced students of English for academic purposes. In this version I have inserted my own solutions to the problem of identification: 40 The infinite scattering of all potential things denies our conception of a distance between them or of an idea of separateness. The touching of all things and all moments revives the once ghostly notion of action at a distance. The correlation of one thing with another requires no exchanging of force or connecting of signals. Known as ‘non-locality’, or correlation in the absence of any local forces, this somewhat eerie interconnectedness throws up enormous conceptual challenges. Arguably it is the greatest conceptual challenge of quantum reality. (based on an extract from Zohar and Marshall, 1994: 35) The identification of these nominal forms posed few difficulties to students who were both linguistically advanced and conceptually able. Understanding the passage was more difficult, however. The only area of grammatical discussion concerned ‘interconnectedness’ which is slightly different because it is the nominalisation of an adjectival form and as such refers to a quality, rather than an action. The rewriting of the nominalised forms using a different grammar was intended to demonstrate the neatness of this type of conceptual shorthand. In order to show how neatly nominalisation expresses the impact of one event upon another, I tried to illustrate the process by a diagram such as that shown in Figure 3.2. One process impacts upon another and causes a change, just as one truck bumps into another and causes it to move. In my diagram, the trucks carry nominalised phrases to signify the phrases’ impact upon each other. I later realised that I had reverted to a cognitivist interpretation of these nominalised forms. It is an interpretation that calls into question one of the basic ideas of the SFL thesis and prompts thought about how we approach grammar in the classroom. First, SFL defines metaphor as a departure from congruent meaning. A problem for an idea of congruent meaning is the same as for an idea of literal meaning – that finally there

The Language and Structure of Metaphor 73 Cause-and-effect grammatical metaphor The first truck hits the second and the second truck moves cause

The in fi of all nite scatte poten ri tial th ng ings

effect

denies

Our conceiving of separateness

Figure 3.2 Using grammatical metaphor: actions impacting on actions

is no way of knowing when a meaning is literal or congruent. Metaphor unfixes a meaning from one domain and shifts it towards another, where sometimes it may stick and sometimes it may not. The issue of what is literal or not is an issue of social agreement at any one time (Elgin, 1983), and we are unable to stand outside our own society and determine quite when this has happened at any given moment of use. The stabilisation of a metaphor as a congruent form is therefore more a feature of an evolving language. The issue of whether a sentence such as 31 above (I think it’s going to rain) is metaphorical or not should no longer depend on how we analyse its grammar, but upon how we perceive the historical development of the meaning of ‘think’. The problem becomes one of largely subjective judgement as to the degree to which the verb’s new form is considered conventional and thus literal (Holme, forthcoming). Congruence aspires to a notion of ‘directness’ as if to imply, also, proximity to some less mediated form of expression (Halliday, 1985). The geometric metaphor itself suggests symmetry, as in the sense of a language that is in symmetry with an unmediated unfolding of events. Language that is not congruent suggests something that is difficult to interpret because it is not directly attuned to the normal interaction of one object with another. But, as we have already said, we need the metaphors of real-world objects and their interactions in order to help us conceptualise abstract ideas and the relationships between them. An assumption of the SFL analysis is that grammatical metaphor is evidence of a mature language use where text moves language away from its direct expression of relationships as they are found in the world. In fact a more accurate description might be that a nominalisation expressing a cause-and-effect

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relationship is using a metaphor of the impact of one object upon another to conceptualise a difficult, abstract relationship. We can understand this if we look at sentence 42, which is a congruent reading of 41: 41 The US’s decision to release 30 m barrels from its strategic petroleum reserve helped to push oil prices back from a peak of $34 a barrel. (Financial Times, 1 October 2000). 42 The US government decided to release 30 m barrels from its strategic reserve. Thus, the US government helped to push oil prices back from a peak of $34 a barrel. In 42, the direct cause-and-effect relationship of 41 is no longer expressed. Instead a linking adjunct, ‘thus’, is used to underscore the cause-and-effect relationship of the two sentences and their expression of two otherwise separate events. Yet the adjunct may not render this relationship as clearly, and I would argue that the adjunct may even make the logic of the relationship more remote and difficult to grasp. The grammatical metaphor grounds the cause-and-effect relationship in a physical one. The linking adjunct, on the other hand, tries to express logic as it has evolved towards a more abstract connection. The grammatical metaphor employs the relationship of one object impacting upon another, then causing its movement. We can conceive of the two ‘processes’ as if they were things in process of impact. Langacker (1994) refers to the thing that is represented by the sentence’s subject as a sentence’s ‘charged head’. In the underlying pattern of this sentence it carries its energy onto another object. Grammatical metaphor represents abstract relationships through a metaphor that treats actions or events as objects. In doing so, it makes the causative relationship between them clear. A larger point is that grammatical metaphor may seem to emerge not as a departure from congruent language, but as an exploitation of the natural or direct relationships through which we conceptualise cause-and-effect connections. I experimented with diagrams of cause and effect that showed a billiard ball striking another ball, to show cause (strike) as effect (movement of the second ball). Yet these did not really elucidate the expressions I wanted to teach. I then opted for a more direct approach and began my class by dramatising the subject, verb, object relationship by shouting ‘my hand strikes the table’ as I slapped the desk with my palm. A student sitting close to me looked alarmed and asked if I was angry. I said ‘very’, smiled, then divided the board into three columns labelled, ‘thing’, ‘action’, ‘thing’, in which I wrote ‘my hand’, ‘strikes’, and ‘the

The Language and Structure of Metaphor 75

table’. Another student looked annoyed by this elementary start and ventured ‘subject’, ‘verb’, ‘object’. I asked what ‘my hand’ was, subject, verb or object? The student said ‘subject’ and looked restless: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student:

‘Yes, but is it a noun or a verb or what?’ ‘A noun.’ ‘What’s a noun?’ ‘A thing or people.’ ‘What’s “move”?’ (gestures away from their body with their hand and still looks annoyed by the content of the lesson) Teacher: ‘Noun, verb or what …’(responds to the student’s impatience by tapping the chalk impatiently on the board) Student: ‘Noun.’ Teacher: ‘But nouns are people, places or things and “movement” is an “action”.’ We then agreed that ‘movement’ was an action pretending to be a noun, and I added to the three columns, ‘actions’, ‘cause’, ‘actions’, followed by ‘movement’, ‘causes’, ‘movement’. I next read out a list of verbs I had prepared and asked the students to turn them into nouns. As they did so I wrote them on the board and added the rest of a preprepared subject phrase: Teacher: ‘Discuss.’ Student: ‘Discussion.’ Teacher: ‘or discussing.’ (writes ‘discussing problems’ in the first column on the board) I repeated this with other verbs and then asked for the noun form of ‘search’. A student suggested ‘searching’, I pointed out that ‘search’ could either be a noun or a verb and wrote ‘search for a common policy’, so that the board resembled Table 3.2. Next, I gave them the handout shown in Table 3.3, and asked them to produce noun phrases from the verb phrases in the right-hand column; for example, ‘use labour more efficiently’ was changed to ‘a more efficient use of labour’. I then asked them to take one of the noun phrases they had created from the first column on the board, ‘greater capacity utilisation’, a verb from the central column, ‘encouraged’, to create a sentence ‘greater capacity utilisation encouraged a more efficient use of labour’.

76 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching Table 3.2 Grammatical metaphor: the subject as a ‘charged head’ My hand

hits

the table

Thing Action

action causes

thing action

Movement discussing problems bringing about a new social order forcing the pace of change refusing to listen to sceptics changing old customs greater capacity utilisation the introduction of new procedures

causes encouraged

movement the search for a common policy

Table 3.3 Grammatical metaphor: a table to help students with nominalised structures Created Accelerated Forced Encouraged Impeded Motivated Meant

Use labour more efficiently Reduce unemployment Redistribute power Expand some types of activity Search for a common policy Localise solutions Establish new social structures

Gradually we built up a grid of acceptable sentences illustrating the power of ‘Process to Actor’ and ‘Process to Goal’ grammatical metaphors as a way of expressing direct cause-and-effect relationships. The use of a prototypical ‘noun/thing, verb/action, noun/thing’ sentence helped them to understand how they were turning verbs into nouns so that they could take subject and object roles in the sentence. In another class I used this type of procedure to help students develop cause-and-effect chains. An unexpected outcome was how students began to use nominalisation as a cohesive device, or as a way to link the meaning of one sentence back to another and thus to create cohesion in a longer passage of discourse. I first gave the students a verb and an object phrase such as ‘brought about inflation’ and ‘leads to impeachment’ and asked them to supply a ‘cause’. Initially, the more willing and vocal contributors produced some reasonable sentences such as ‘bad leads to impeachment’ (corrected to ‘wrong-doing leads to impeachment’) and ‘inflation resulted in poverty’.

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The country lapsed into a state of civil war. The fighting.....

Figure 3.3 Grammatical metaphor and the creation of textual cohesion

Moving round the class I asked them to construct a cause-and-effect chain-story. I gave them the first sentence, and was surprised to find that we had also moved on into the area of discourse construction. Thus, I wrote on the board an opening sentence: ‘The country lapsed into a state of civil war’. Then I asked them what people did in war. The answer was easily given as ‘fight’. I asked a student for a ‘noun’ again, they said ‘fighting’. I wrote the first sentence on the board, then said how ‘fighting’ was a summary of much of the meaning of the first sentence and it could be used to carry that into the next as the cause of something else (Figure 3.3). As the story unfolded, I wrote a corrected version onto the board which developed with surprisingly little prompting or backtracking. The lesson was being carried in an interesting direction, as it was clear that cause and effect was becoming more than the focus of individual sentences; it was crucial to the construction of extended argument. The corrected story was as follows: 43 The country lapsed into a state of civil war. The fighting among citizens put them in difficulties. These national problems led to a reduction of economic development. The decline brought about inflation which resulted in poverty. The disaster brought about suffering. The suffering made the life in the country terrible. This desperate state caused a revolution. This led to UN intervention. The intervention succeeded in settling the conflict. The settlement led to the ending of the war. My reworking might distort some of the subtlety of the SFL analysis, but I would argue that it is not only truer to the way in which these meanings have actually been constructed, it also offers students a clearer rationale for why these meanings are expressed in a given manner. In earlier classes on nominalisation, I found that a notion of grammatical metaphor served to complicate what was generally taught as a straightforward verb-to-noun transformation. However, the presentation of it through a ‘thing–action–thing’ metaphor was a useful way to rationalise

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why we nominalise in this way. That rationalisation was made clearer when it became a feature of how we construct argument with many sentences rather than with just one. The accuracy with which these structures were reproduced by most of the students also surprised me. I had asked them to treat an action as a ‘thing’, or to reify it in other words. This reification gave meaning to an abstract grammatical process and resulted in a larger than anticipated uptake of it in their subsequent work.

Elliptical similes In the SFL analysis, metaphor rests in a departure from congruent language. Unfortunately, the concept of congruency does not greatly advance our attempts to identify metaphor. Instead it moves the problem from one of the difference between literal and figurative language towards one of the difference between language that is congruent and not congruent. Second, congruent language must be grounded in the ties between language and the everyday physical interactions of things, as when ‘one object strikes another and moves it’. From a cognitivist perspective, metaphor is not a departure from these straightforward expressions of meaning. It is exploitation of the physical interactions that are implicit in them. As I found above, students grasped one use of nominalisation most easily when it was presented as reification and not as the masquerade of a Process as an Actor or Goal. Yet even if the SFL analysis fails, metaphor does not always appear without linguistic markers. Consider, 44, below: 44 He was through this in a moment, and the darkness that lay beyond, took him, as it were, to herself, muffling the edges of his sharp body. (Mervyn Peak: Gormenghast: 379) The darkness is treated as female and in embracing a character (he), threatens their sense of identity. The author draws attention to their metaphor, suggesting almost that it is tentative and perhaps even outlandish. They do this with the phrase ‘as it were’. Goatly (1997) sees structures such as the following as common signals of live metaphor construction: It was as if … It was ⫹ adj ⫹ as … It was as though …

The Language and Structure of Metaphor 79

It had the feeling of … rather than of I might have been … A phrase such as ‘as it were’ (Goatly, 1997) may be inserted into a text because the writer feels that a figurative usage is not entirely appropriate to the genre. For example, a research article may aspire to a notion of literal language and could therefore require that a figurative usage should be marked, as if by way of apology. Another phrase such as ‘it was rather as if’ may signal that the interlocutor is uncertain about whether they have found a metaphor that is entirely appropriate. Less directly, it may signal that the event in question is strange or almost unique because even metaphor expresses it poorly. It may also indicate that the speaker is making a modest assessment of their own powers of expression. A traditional mode of rhetorical analysis would say that expressions using ‘like’ and ‘as’ to compare unlike things are not metaphors at all but similes. A truth-conditional analysis would also concur with this view. For example, if we say that ‘the darkness was like a woman’, we can then say that this is true only if the darkness was like a woman. However, if we say that ‘the darkness is a woman’, we can say that this is untrue because it never can be. By this argument, the first statement is not deviant and is different in kind from the second (Davidson, 1979). If we develop this argument, we can say that a metaphor does not violate its truth conditions if we interpret it as a simile where the expression of similarity, ‘like’ or ‘as’, has been elided or omitted. Metaphors should therefore be seen as elliptical similes (ibid.) where ‘is’ in fact means ‘is like’. Support for this conclusion could be drawn from the way in which a language such as Chinese may require an expression of similarity in place of the copula it does not have if it is to build an equivalent type of expression. A very different argument that goes back to Aristotle, holds that simile and metaphor use language with different degrees of force. Saying ‘Juliet was like the sun’ would put Juliet more on the periphery of the class of ‘suns’ or brilliant objects that she is held to belong to. ‘Like’ is a kind of qualification. Juliet is ‘like’ this class of solar objects, not part of it. ‘Juliet is the sun’ insists that we situate her inside the category itself making a stronger assertion that we must look for the grounds of her belonging to it. A simile is therefore a hedged metaphor. One problem with this view of similes as meaningful or not according to a truth-conditional analysis arises from how we can know whether their target domain, ‘love’, for example, is in fact like their source domain, ‘the path of a star’. In order to assert that one thing is categorically

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‘like’ another, we need a concept of similarity against which we can judge it to be so. What this concept of similarity would be must require some thought. Gentner and Jeziorski (1993) distinguished between two types of similarity, a literal and a metaphorical one. Thus, a literal similarity would exist on the basis of shared visual or physical attributes. It would posit two domains sharing features of their construction or their appearance. This is illustrated by example 45, below. The literal nature of the statement is revealed by how the removal of ‘like’ changes the expression’s meaning completely: 45 46 47 48

The house is like the one in Spain. This house is the one in Spain. This house is like a sliced melon. This house is a sliced melon.

On the other hand, if we do the same thing with 47, we will produce a metaphor, as in 48, with a meaning that may only change in its emphasis (ibid.). This is because ‘like’ in example 47 is both marking and hedging the rhetorical force of a metaphor, as opposed to expressing a real similarity. Therefore the issue of simile and metaphor does not concern the relationship between the literal comparison 45, ‘the house is like the one in Spain’, and a metaphorical one, 46, ‘the house is (like) a sliced melon’, but between two expressions of a metaphorical one. But a non-literal view of similarity may simply make the concept of similarity even vaguer. Goodman (1972) remarked how all things have trivial common properties, if only by the fact of being things. Thus, in Goodman’s example, two things can be similar because they are placed in a way that makes them equidistant from Mars. Accordingly, a similarity relationship is difficult to specify because it can be extended to virtually any two sets of phenomena. We can understand the force of Goodman’s observation by engaging in a simple classroom experiment or procedure that I once saw demonstrated by a colleague. First she took 10 blank cards and, with little conscious thought, wrote the name of a common phenomenon onto each. Her selection was made at random. For example, ‘horse, moon, star, house, roof, insect, tiger, tree, book, water’, are 10 terms that come to mind. She next wrote one abstract concept onto each of another 10 cards: ‘love, hatred, loneliness, anger, desire, interest, intelligence, thought, power, domination’, could be used. She then dealt out a pair of cards to each student, one from each set. The students had to make a metaphor with their concept card and their object card and place them down on

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a central table as they did so (Julie King, personal communication). ‘Domination is a house’, was a seemingly unpropitious example in one of the classes where I tried this. Finally, each student had to justify the randomly constructed metaphor by treating it as a comparison and elaborating on that basis. The student with ‘domination is a house’ was a little stuck but another came to their rescue: Student: ‘This is an English metaphor.’ Teacher: ‘It’s in English.’ Student: ‘No, houses are dominating English people.’ Teacher: ‘They dominate English people. Yes, we spend our lives paying for them.’ Student: ‘Do it yourself.’ (they had just been taught this) Teacher: ‘Yes paying for them and looking after them.’ So we could tease out a narrative of a house as epitomising a modern form of dominion over our lives. More propitious was ‘desire is a horse’ (it carries us away – not to mention the obvious stallion metaphor), while strange but needing no prompt was ‘intelligence is a tree’ (you can climb up it and see everywhere). In another phase one can turn all the cards up on the table and ask students to create the metaphors that they prefer then provide a rationale for them. Although the outcome produces expressions that are less bizarre, it is not necessarily more productive: Student: ‘Anger is a tiger.’ Teacher: ‘Why?’ Student: ‘It makes that noise.’ Teacher: ‘Growls. Anger growls.’ It is possible to use lexis in either domain that corresponds to thematic areas that are under discussion. Thus, if ‘houses’ are an objective one can choose associated lexis (room, roof, door, furniture and so on) for the source domain, or if looking at social change, target domains could be built out of that lexical area (revolution, evolution, development and so forth). Although we can find similarities between almost any two items, the ease with which we can do this is very much a question of degree. Tverski (1977) argued that the similarity of two items was not just a function of the features that they shared but should also take into account the weighting given to these features, or their prominence. The similarity judgement depends on our prior ability to extrapolate

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and accord prominence to the features that will be judged similar (Glucksberg, 2001). Tverski’s model of similarity would ensure that one house could be declared similar to another because the styles of the roofs, the windows and the nature of building materials were shared. Because these features are essential to the nature of a house then the similarity would be strong. If two houses shared a less salient or obvious property such as an identical drainage and electrical system then their coefficient of similarity would be low. However, Tverski’s theory does not explain why a simile can suddenly strike an evocative and powerful chord even though it may be about two unlike things. D.H. Lawrence declares that ‘love is the path of the star’ and many readers agree, but none seem clear about why. At the same time, if I declare that ‘my foot is a moon beam’, this seems foolish and unevocative. Lakoff and Johnson (for example 1999) and Gibbs (1994) argue that because metaphor deals with unlike phenomena, it cannot be based on a similarity relationship at all. For them metaphors strike a chord because we process them through schematised conceptual metaphor. Thus when Othello says ‘this is the sea mark of my appetite’ we process this through ‘desire is an appetite’ and ‘life and love are journeys’. Lakoff and Johnson’s argument draws support from Ortony’s (1993) observation that metaphors may involve comparisons that are too stretched to involve a real similarity relationship. The comparisons ‘are not part of the listener’s topic at all’ (cited in Glucksberg, 2001). Accordingly, in Cooper’s (1986) example, ‘eternity is a spider’, the topic ‘eternity’ has nothing to do with the vehicle ‘a spider’. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) observe how the domains of conceptual metaphors may have no shared features. Such examples as ‘love is a journey’, ‘time is a resource’ or ‘up is happiness’ reveal no plausible link between their source and target domains, yet the source takes form within the target and adopts features of it. Thus ‘love’ takes on the attributes of a journey with a beginning, a progression and an end. According to Grady (1997) such mappings may often occur in infancy and more as the result of a recurrent coincidence between feeling and events, ‘satisfaction’ and ‘standing upright for the first time’, for example, to give ‘up is happiness’. However, to argue that ‘love’ and a ‘journey’ are not similar may be to oversimplify our notion of similarity and resemblance. Such metaphors may be what Glucksberg and Keysar (1993) call proportional in that they are based on a sharing of argument structures by the source and target domains: Thus, love departs from a ‘beginning’ and achieves a destination just as a journey does. These matches could be grounds for a

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similarity relationship, though the match is conceptual not visual. It is true that there is no way of seeing ‘love’ in this way before it is conceptualised in space as a kind of journey. Love is a relationship, not a walk in the park. But we describe ‘love’ as a journey because we understand that it has a beginning, a progression and an end. Three of love’s most salient features are shared with those of a journey. Once this featuresharing has occurred, ‘the journey’ can lend its other attributes, ‘pauses’, ‘detours’, ‘dead-end streets’ and so on in order to develop the theme of love. ‘Love’ by itself possesses no explicit narrative apart from the essential prerequisite of an end and a beginning. ‘Journeys’ evoke a clearer and more elaborate chronology which they can map onto ‘love’. There are other problems with the view that metaphors are a type of simile and hence founded on a similarity relationship. First, even when a source domain and a target domain do share a similarity relationship, we do not make this relationship into the basis of how we use the two terms (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). For example, a metaphor that commonly enters many, if not all, languages, is ‘knowledge is sight’. Thus, we often substitute the verb ‘see’ for the verb ‘know’ or ‘understand’ as when we say ‘I see’ after grasping some point. However, there is no sense of similarity in the actual usage as one cannot literally ‘see’ what somebody ‘means’ (ibid.). Another difficulty is that a given item, such as marriage, cannot be similar to two totally different phenomena at the same time (ibid.). Thus, if we agree as to the truth of a statement such as ‘marriage is a business partnership’, we would be unable to find meaning in ‘marriage is children’ because marriage could not be similar to two such different things and remain the same thing (ibid.). However, this last assertion may overidentify a similarity relationship with an equality relationship. It is obvious that when x equals y and y does not equal z, then x does not equal z. Yet it is not obvious that when x is similar to y and y is similar to z, then z is similar to x. For example, sentences 49–51, below, show clearly how a given item ‘my house’ can be similar to two other items that are not similar to each other. This is because different features are used to construct the similarity relationship: 49 My house is like Julie’s because our walls are the same. 50 My house is like Helen’s because the doors and windows are the same. 51 Helen’s house is not like Julie’s because the walls, the doors and the windows are not the same and Helen’s house is largely timber while Julie’s is largely brick.

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It remains the case that metaphors are created from a vast and disparate range of domains, many of which would stretch our belief in any real underlying similarity. It is also true that metaphors invite searches for similarities or for feature matches that we assume to be there. Thus simply by suggesting that two things are alike we trigger a search for likeness and the fluid nature of similarity means that we will always find something. When we considered categories and family resemblances in the last chapter, we thought about how students can fold-out networks of ideas that are united by the properties that exist between one and another but which have no complete unifying property. Students can be encouraged to build imaginary categories that finish by enveloping almost everything because each thing is similar only to the thing that it adjoins. Fauconnier and Turner’s blend model of metaphor does give featuremapping a role in metaphor-forming processes (1998 and 2002). They illustrate this with a riddle that had previously been presented by Arthur Koestler in his book, The Act of Creation: 52 A Buddhist Monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or his stopping or about his pace during the trips. Riddle: Is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on two separate journeys? The solution to the riddle is that we have to see the monk as two different people, one going up and one going down the same path between dawn and sunset. There has to be a place where the two people meet. The two people represent the monk’s two separate journeys. The monk must therefore meet himself. We should remember from Chapter 1 that a blend has two input mental spaces. In the example of the Buddhist monk, we have to place their upward journey in one space and their downward journey in the other. We then see what Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 41) call a ‘partial cross-space mapping’ that connects ‘counterparts in the input mental spaces’. The connection of counterparts suggests some feature matching which does not seem overly different from a similarity assessment. For example, ‘mountain, moving individual, day of travel and motion’ in one mental space maps onto ‘mountain, moving individual, day of travel and motion’ in the other mental space. The unmapped counterparts from input 1 are

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blended with those from input 2. Thus, the different directions of the journeys and the different times are projected one onto another. Examining Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) ‘love is a journey’ through this structure, we can see counterpart connections in the temporal and progressive nature of love and of a journey but core differences in the nature of how we experience them. It is these core differences, as between an emotion and a visible progression from one identifiable location to another which allow ‘journeys’ to become a dominant means of conceptualisation for ‘love’ relationships. The power of Fauconnier and Turner’s model is revealed by the way in which simplified blend structures with their counterpart connections can become useful classroom vehicles to encourage a development that is both linguistic and cognitive. The riddle of the Buddhist monk slots into an ELT tradition of using puzzles and enigmas to provide practice in particular areas of language or simply to furnish tasks that engender meaningful language use. After telling the story of the monk, a teacher might draw a box in the left-hand corner of the board then ask a student to draw the monk’s journey up the mountain inside its frame (see Figure 3.4). They may repeat this for the downward journey in the right-hand box. A blank third box can be drawn beneath them which can be left empty but in which they should ask the class to imagine picture 1 imposed on picture 2. If students are still unable to see the solution, the teacher can ask them to identify what will not superimpose and what will. The mismatched elements, or the downward and upward trajectories, will provide the solution to the problem. Figure 3.4 shows the completed

Figure 3.4 Blends in the classroom: Koestler’s Buddhist monk

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diagram. The manner in which it draws upon the blend structure model is interesting. Language teachers can also use the process of counterpart-mapping to help students understand when language is appropriate to one context but not to another. Teachers are often trained to think about devising contexts that will illustrate how a given form should be used. Less time is given to considering whether a new context shares enough features with the one in which an area of language is presented to warrant the use of the same forms, or to the adaptations that are required. In her study of learning transfer in infants and children, Anne Brown (1989: 387–8) reflects on how to achieve a greater readiness to understand similarity relations between the underlying structures of two domains, encouraging children to use different tools to complete the same task, for example. She shows how such conceptual flexibility can be encouraged through a positive learning experience involving functional flexibility, and cognitive disembedding. Functional flexibility is the encouragement of the learner to see a given solution as widely applicable to different sets of problems. Cognitive disembedding is how we encourage abstraction so that the relational structure between two unlike areas of operation is perceived and disembedded so that it can be applied to multiple sets of operations. This last notion would be less applicable in an era of CBT where a more likely explanation is series of blends between one prototypical operation and other operational problems without the disembedding and reapplication of the structures implied. An effective transfer of language across contexts calls for the operation of the blend networks that will carry language from one context to another forcing the adaptations that are appropriate. In search of such functional flexibility I have begun with a standard dialogue where the interlocutors are simply labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’: A: ‘Hello.’ B: ‘Hi.’ A: ‘So, how are things with you?’ B: ‘Oh, you know, getting by.’ A: ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ The students imagine a context for this exchange. Often they opt for the informal, saying that it is a meeting of friends in the street. I then ask if this conversation could be ‘doctor to patient’. Many in the class will not allow that. So I ask them to work in groups and consider what they would change to make it fit that context. They should change as little as

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possible. One wanted to insert ‘doctor’, as a form of address to give ‘hello, Doctor’. I said that might be possible but was not essential. Another objected to ‘Yes I know what you mean’. They made the insightful comment that ‘the doctor wasn’t ill too’. I objected that they could be talking about the poor state of Britain’s health service. Finally, we agreed that the dialogue could hold for that situation but might be better without the last comment. Some students commented on how this would be very different in their cultures. We then looked at three other contexts: ‘a PhD supervisor greeting their student’, ‘a school teacher greeting a pupil’ and ‘the opening of a job interview’. The last called for a complete rewrite with general agreement. The first was the most relevant to them as most of the class were about to start graduate study. Many students did not like the fact that they were not using their supervisor’s name. We then discussed what they should call their supervisor. I explained that most graduate students and their supervisors were on first name terms but they had to get to know the culture of the academic department where they worked before they could assume this. The school teacher-to-student context also involved discussion as some wanted to insert more formal greetings, names and titles. They had not realised that in many British schools the students were expected to call teachers ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’, whereas the exact nature of the greeting would depend on where it occurred. ‘Hello/Hi Sir/Miss’ might be acceptable when passing in a corridor for example. A similar activity involves the creation of feature-matched contexts. When PPP lesson plans focus on grammar they assume that if a structure is presented in a context that reveals the structure’s principles of use then students will be able to generalise those principles to practice situations and finally to real life as the appropriate context arises. In a traditional situational approach, a plan for the present simple will put forward the tense inside a context that makes clear its expression of unlimited time. The plan will look at the description of habits, for example. In the practice phase, the teacher will suggest a context were students must describe habits or customs, hoping that this will elicit the tense. A functional methodology reverses that assumption and looks for a situation that encapsulates the function of describing routines then presents the tense as one way to express these. In both types of procedure, the practice phase often fails in its primary aim. In one class I was observing, a student asked to describe their routines told the class about the arrangement of their room. They used a language of stative relations: ‘the books are on a shelf. The computer is always working on the desk’. This last correct use of the present continuous sabotaged the

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objective of the lesson and had never been fully taught. The teacher judged this final part of their lesson to be a failure but the student’s discourse was probably made richer by its spontaneous refusal to engage with the purpose of the lesson. An approach that recognised the importance of finding featurematched contexts might pass to a practice stage when the teacher asks the students to suggest situations of use. The students will effectively be their own teacher by setting out plausible situations that will help them explore the language that has been presented: Teacher: ‘Sometimes things do not stop. What does not stop?’ Student: ‘Time.’ Teacher: ‘So your watch …’ (writes watch on the board) ‘your watch does not stop, your watch goes on, the hands go round. And what else doesn’t stop?’ Students: (no response) The student’s silence shows how their lack of familiarity with this type of exercise means that the teacher must force the pace. But this is to be expected because the search for analogous contexts is not something to which we often give conscious thought. One way to engage students is to chop one context into a group of subordinate ones. For example, ‘tradition/customs’, can become, ‘family customs and national traditions’: Teacher: ‘In your country. What you do. Your …’ Students: (no response) Teacher: ‘Traditions?’ (writes traditions on the board) Student: ‘Custom?’ Teachers: ‘Family customs, or the customs of your country?’ (writes customs on the board) ‘And the things you do everyday which your neighbours may not do? Your routines.’ (writes routines on the board) Student: ‘What routines?’ Teacher: ‘Your own customs. Not what Ahmed or Hassan do. What you do.’ I then tried to elicit the devices that structure our routines, the timetables, diaries and programmes. Looking at timetables in their many forms, whether for trains, schools or other types of institution one can start to find many analogous contexts for the present simple. Students can then be asked to select one of the contexts and talk about it.

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The treatment of contexts as analogous with students being asked to engage in unconscious feature matching can be a powerful device to help students stretch the language that they have and to understand more about issues of cultural differences and linguistic appropriacy. It also triggered some intonation practice when we considered how the same dialogue could be used in contexts of varying formality with changes to the way it was said.

Marked metaphors Some computation of shared features will either emerge from or precede metaphor creation. The fundamental distinction between the literal similarity of a statement of object likeness and the non-literal similarity of a simile may not be as clear-cut as it first appears. The simile may simply be extending a literal similarity relationship as it insists we find similarities between its unlike domains. What is plain, however, is that similes and metaphors propose similar types of relationship between their domains. In the second chapter we discussed the possibility of metaphor as close to class inclusion. Saying ‘John is a bear’ was stretching the bear category so that it could encompass ‘John’ the human, thus blending one into the other. When a metaphor is hedged by an expression of similitude we are holding ‘John’ and ‘bear’ slightly apart, as if to suggest that John is like the bear class but not yet a fully paid-up member. If we need to hedge metaphorical expression, a command of figurative language requires a command of the language with which we do this. As Goatly has shown, this involves quite a large repertoire of conjunctive phrases. Classes that have that repertoire may begin better with an informal conversation, which allows a ‘drawing in’ or ‘whirlpool structure’ where the looser form is pulled slowly towards the linguistic objective carrying the students’ attention with them so that they are sucked in before they know it. In this vein, I once begun an evening class by talking with a group about their sense of isolation during winter nights in the north-east of England while we waited for everybody to arrive. Without too strong a change of tone to mark our arrival at the planned stage of the lesson, I asked for one sentence that might express this feeling of isolation. One student remarked: ‘I am nowhere’, which started the following exchange: Teacher: ‘Say that again with “as if”.’ Student: ‘I don’t understand.’

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Teacher: ‘Use “as if”. You said “I am nowhere”. Say that again with “as if”.’ Student: ‘I am as if nowhere.’ Teacher: ‘I feel as if I am nowhere.’ Student: ‘Yes, I feel-’ Teacher: ‘But you are somewhere.’ Student: ‘A kind of somewhere.’ Teacher: ‘If you were nowhere you would be dead.’ Student: ‘Here, I feel dead.’ Teacher: ‘You are using “dead” as a metaphor because clearly you are alive. That’s good. The lesson is about metaphorical expression. You are as if dead.’ I next asked the class to think about events that they wished had never happened. They made some notes in English in order to remind themselves of their thoughts at a later point. One of the students laughed about ‘it being too awful’. I reassured them that the event did not have to be tragic but could be simply embarrassing, and that they would not be asked to recount the event if they did not want to. Next, I asked them to focus on a very positive event that they had learnt from. The event had to be really incredible or wonderful. I gave the students a short handout of some phrases that signal metaphorical expression (It was as if; it was as though; it had the feeling of … rather than of; it might have been …; as it were; it as ⫹ adj ⫹ as) and asked them to remember an event that was very strange and difficult to explain. They had to comment on the event without actually mentioning what had occurred. I suggested they do this by using the first expression on their handout (it was as if …). They found this difficult so I moved to the second structure and asked them to find an adjective that would summarise one of their events. A quieter student produced the adjective ‘depressing’ then made the sentence: Student:

‘It was as depressing as failing an exam.’

After some correction, his classmate produced the sentence: Student 2: ‘It was as embarrassing as a knight falling off his horse in the big parade.’ She then recounted an amusing story where she claimed to have witnessed this spectacle at a pageant. She then had to reword the metaphor

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using another more complex structure. I gave her a model sentence with spaces that asked her to insert certain forms in them: Teacher: (writes on the board) This scene had the (abstract noun) and (abstract noun) of …… rather than of …… The task was ambitious, and several language problems arose despite the advanced level of the group. ‘Rather than’ was unfamiliar and needed explanation. Some of the class understood the category of an ‘abstract noun’ intellectually but could not turn that understanding into an example. To help, I asked the students to form nouns out of the two adjectives that had been used: ‘ashamed’ and ‘embarrassed’, and the student who had come up with the metaphor had to complete the suggested structure with the nouns that they had formed: Student: (writing) This scene had the embarrassment and shame of …… rather than of …… Again she found it difficult to come up with the metaphors so I suggested she use ‘the knight metaphor’ then try to find a different one for the second slot. I asked her to repeat word by word: Teacher: ‘This scene had the embarrassment and shame of a knight falling off his horse at a parade rather than of …’ And tried to persuade her to complete the sentence with a comparison that was not as apt. This was also baffling, so I again helped her through: Teacher: ‘This scene had the embarrassment and shame of a knight falling off his horse at a parade rather than of – I don’t know – a man spilling soup over somebody at a dinner.’ Student: (repeats phrase by phrase) I took the students back through the completed sentence and asked them to repeat it as a disappearing text on the board (Holme, 1991). This meant that they read it with one word rubbed out, then with two or three words rubbed out, next four or five, continuing until the whole text is read without a word being written. I then shifted the theme to the expression of more difficult memories and the use of a different structure: Teacher:

‘It was as though I was going to die.’

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This metaphor provoked a more reflective tone. Without being prompted, the student who had made this statement recounted her fears as a child in Argentina when the junta had forced her family into exile and they had had to seek refuge in Italy. She told how her sense of insecurity still followed her. Her classmate was clearly affected by this account and became more talkative. He was then asked for a metaphor of his own and shifted the subject away towards a very different tone by exploiting the handout with an accuracy that surprised me: Student:

‘I felt as if I was a bird.’

He then described his first experience of paragliding. This student, who had had so little to contribute to other classes, lost his shyness and took over the conversation. The metaphor drew out an obsessive interest that then stimulated a long series of questions from his colleagues. I could drop back onto the periphery of the class as the student took centrestage. Other metaphors began to slip into the discourse: ‘it was as if you were free from the ground’, ‘I might have been a crazy man’, ‘it was as though I begun again …’. The class questioned him about every aspect of his hobby. He discussed the equipment and its technology, the problems of safety and where the best places were to fly. A class that had begun with a focus upon some of the forms of figurative expression, and diverted into an examination of some unrelated structures, now finished as an unstructured dialogue with a student, once made shy of speech by his fear of error, becoming the centre of attention. Metaphors may sometimes mark their appearance in language with recurrent formal features. These features are not simply valuable as an advanced pedagogical point in themselves, they are also a useful way to elicit metaphors and thus to encourage a more creative use of the target language. The metaphors are often ordinary in themselves but they may be attached to a string of memories and associations. The detailing of these memories is simply a natural elaboration of the metaphor. Even shy students find something to discuss. I have sometimes been wary of affective or humanistic approaches to teaching that focus on personal issues when students may not wish to do so, forcing a more intense introspection than might normally fall within the expectations that students have when they sign up for a language class. At the same time, most language teaching is eminently forgettable. A language contextualised by virtual lives demands that

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the students become virtual also, scripting their existences with the language of these lives and failing to hold on to that existence with the core of their embodied self. Language classes work when they engage students in issues that are important to them, whether these are of an academic, political or personal nature. Procedures where students construct metaphors out of what matters leaves them with the freedom to construct varying degrees of emotional space between them and the events they choose to describe. The metaphor can be closed tight upon the events it evokes holding them in their entirety, alternatively it can let their larger form slip through its grasp, leaving others to reconstruct this from the few features that are held. In the class described, I noticed how a use of metaphor gave students a conceptual freedom concerning their own thought. They could if they chose follow the example of the student from Argentina and let the metaphor trawl for the emotions evoked by an anxious and difficult moment. If they wanted to express that moment then they could. If they wanted to focus on their engagement with a hobby or interest, then they could do that. However, the discourse that was stimulated was immediately more intense and more elaborate than would have been evoked by some standard lesson on likes and dislikes.

Conclusion In this chapter I have extended the exploration of live metaphor. I have assumed that we can start to understand and pedagogically exploit the metaphorical basis of language by looking at forms of expression whose figurative nature is immediately apparent. If we first deal with such features and the processes through which they are formed, we can begin to understand what is at stake, then use that understanding to induct the student into the larger, hidden store of buried metaphor that lies at the core of every language. My exploration of metaphor took it away from the core copula expressions that we use to identify metaphor’s properties. I looked at the forms it can affect and found that these were not limited to any particular part of speech, unit of a sentence or sentence. I used that failure of limitation to underscore how we were not dealing with the properties of a linguistic form but with those of the processes of meaning-creation and conceptualisation that underlie them. The exploration of the forms that metaphor can take triggered an examination of how students could stretch their interest away from a few prototypical examples towards a larger play with figurative language

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use. That play and the exploration of figurative forms raised the question of whether it had to base itself upon an extended language competence, or a metaphorical competence in other words. For example, a student produced ‘Juliet warms Romeo’ and the teacher found that slightly inappropriate because it made them think of Juliet rubbing Romeo’s cold feet. The teacher added a phrase to make the metaphor more transparent ‘Juliet warms Romeo with her love’. We are now left with the question of whether that addition arises from the teacher’s competence in respect of metaphor use and whether the student’s failure to produce an appropriate metaphor arises from an imperfect competence. Low (1988) attempted a characterisation of the form that a metaphorical competence should take. He broke down a ‘metaphoric competence’ into such elements as ‘the ability to construct plausible meanings’ in metaphor, ‘to differentiate between new metaphors, conventional metaphors and idiosyncratic extensions of old ones’. He further saw this competence as an awareness of how to avoid the coinage of absurd metaphors. It involved an understanding of the type of ‘hedges’ or expressions of similarity used in the last chapter. These hedges signalled whether a statement should be interpreted metaphorically or not. Finally, he argued for the inclusion of the social sensitivity of certain metaphors such as the gender-biased extension of ‘man’ to represent humanity (Low, 1988: 130–2). There are four problems with the core assumptions of this argument. Broadly, the first relates to the nature of metaphor and the final three to the nature of competence: 1 A metaphorical competence assumes that there is a discernible difference between the processes that produce figurative and literal language. The argument, here, is that literal and figurative usage is simply the subject of a native speaker consensus at any one time, but that all abstract meaning, including grammatical meaning is built out of a process whose most obvious manifestation is text metaphor. Blending is behind the production of live metaphor, the search for solutions to riddles and problems or the application of language to novel situations. Live metaphor production is not mentally encapsulated inside its own terms and conditions of use, or its own competence in other words. 2 A competence supposes a storehouse of correspondences between syntactic organisations or sentences and their meanings. A given pattern can be parsed into a given type of meaning, with the position of a word in a sentence or its case marking determining whether,

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for example, a word is to be construed as instigating an action or becoming the object of it. Metaphor threatens such correspondences, though often in a principled way. If that threat was itself the product of a larger regulatory framework, or competence, no new meaning could ever come into existence since it would always be according to the norms already devised. 3 Metaphor does not thus threaten the relationship between a word and its usual meaning according to linguistic ‘rules’ or to a specialised type of competence. Metaphor operates in accordance with the more fundamental cognitive processes of meaning construction. The schemas or mental patterns that lie outside language are themselves implicated in central cognitive processes such as blending that exploit a basic sense of an embodied self as it is in interaction with the world. A linguistic competence originally embodied the aspects of language that were susceptible to scientific enquiry (Chomsky, 1965). A competence represents the rules governing the generation of sentences as a logical and internally consistent system, a system that attempts to assign functions to words independently of their meaning. The objective is a syntax of language that we can describe and compute as if it were different piles of stones (Searle, 1980). The syntax exists prior to every verbal act and is the mechanism that makes that act possible. Its competence must be selfcontained. It supposes the generation of sentences through rules, but, most importantly, these rules of generative grammar are not rationalised out of the wider issues of constructing meanings that are consistent with a given speech situation or the operations of cognition upon it. A cognitive view of language is not motivated by a search for the rules of language, as they are distinct from other facets of mind. It is motivated by an interest in the structures of language as these arise from other features of perception. Both the lexical and grammatical basis of language is perceived as evolving from how the mind processes its existence as a facet of an embodied existence in a physical environment (see for example Gibbs, 1994; Johnson, 1987; Langacker, 1994). According to this view language does not exist as performance or competence but arises from the interaction between the embodied mind with the physical circumstances in which it is placed. A clear and traditional need in formal linguistics is to allow a notion of competence that contains a set of stable relationships between signs and what they signify. In other words, to know a language is to possess a set of individual words and their meanings. Thus we understand that the string of sounds or phonemes that are the word ‘bachelor’ will signify an unmarried man.

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However, in metaphor we find a process that questions the stability and the precision of these sound-meaning correspondences tailoring them to a given conceptual purpose as this is a product of a given context. In this way, writers and readers of text are able to ‘weaken the constraints of probability’ and ‘see possibilities’ of meaning that ‘might otherwise have escaped them’ (Cook, 2000). Once a word is thus unhitched from its normal signification, it acquires an extended meaning potential, to use Halliday’s (1985) term. This potential is difficult to limit or tie down. One cannot predict how the features of a given sociocultural context will constrain these meanings within a frame that its users judge plausible. Metaphor is in part about the creation of that frame perhaps in interaction with a speech situation and the wider sociocultural environment from which it arises. In sum, metaphor should be perceived as external to the idea of competence because it represents a process that both establishes and disrupts the normative correspondences and systems on which a competence would depend. Studies of language and cognition (for example Lakoff, 1987; Glucksberg, 2001; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) show that the characterisation of a lexical competence as simply a set of sign-meaning correspondences is wrong. Even a fairly accurate term such as an adjective of colour, ‘brown’, evokes a wide and shifting spectrum of meanings that will not only evoke colour but also a range of emotions arranging from attractiveness to disgust (‘a brown well-proportioned body’; ‘a brown sludge’). The meaning that is evoked will be determined according to the frames that are called up as inputs to the blend that is the final sentence. Conceptual metaphors exist as schemas or mental patterns that may facilitate the interpretation and production of metaphors as they occur in text. Thus our schematisation of ‘time’ as ‘space’ will facilitate our production and interpretation of such a statement as ‘we have a long way to go before the end of the film’. It may be that such schemas have a role in fashioning our sense of the appropriacy of a metaphor (for example Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). For example, we will find statement 53 immediately meaningful, while 54 is hard work at the least and could be simply dismissed as strange: 53 54

The theory needs a securer foundation. The theory’s been dug too deep, its sides need shoring up.

Sentence 53 latches onto a common conceptualisation of ideas as buildings or physical structures. We are not used to thinking of theories as

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mining the soil beneath us, and because of this we have to expend quite a lot of processing effort to get any meaning from 54 at all. It would thus be tempting to incorporate ‘ideas are buildings’ as a facet of our metaphoric competence in English. However, a conceptual metaphor schema is not a facet of the rules governing the language that we produce but a feature of how we conceptualise and interpret the meanings that language will utilise. It is a principle of meaning extension whose destination cannot always be predicted. It is clear, then, that we should not see our knowledge of metaphor as identifying new features of language that the student has to learn. The use of metaphor cannot simply be posited as the control of an aspect of language positing its own tacked-on competence. We should start to consider metaphor as a feature which helps to explain how language has come to take the form that it has. Metaphor both explains the nature of what is given in language and suggests the mechanisms with which we adapt language’s inherited resources to what is new and strange. Such adaptations reach beyond language. They explain our ability to map new knowledge onto old, becoming integral to the wider theory of learning. Metaphor supposes a connection between the nature of language and the nature of learning thus reopening the prospect of a theory that can forge a securer link between what the student has to learn and the nature of the process through which they will learn about it.

4 Allegory and Analogy: Teaching with Extended Metaphors

Allegory A single metaphor can extend far beyond a sentence, and a common literary device that exploits this capability is an allegory. Arguably, an allegory frames all the events of a story inside an extended metaphor. Gibbs (1994) made this clear with a famous twentieth-century English allegory, George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The underlying metaphor of animal farm is quite clear, it is that ‘a farm is a pre-revolutionary society’. A metaphor has specific entailments (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). When a metaphor has an entailment, we are saying that if a given source domain maps onto a target domain, the constituents of that source domain may also map onto the constituents of a target domain. For example, when thinking about Orwell’s allegory, we know that most English farms have animals and a farmer, who is often the owner. The farmer is therefore a constituent of the source domain. Marx tells us that a prerevolutionary society will have a ruling class which owns capital and an oppressed class that do not own capital and do not gain the full benefit of their labour. These three features, a ruling class of capitalists, capital and an oppressed proletariat are therefore constituents of the source domain. Therefore an entailment of Orwell’s metaphor would be that the farmer is the capitalist because he owns the farm. The farm is the capital because owning it gives the farmer his income. The animals are the revolutionary proletariat because they own nothing and they are maintained only to enrich the farmer. Those who understand Marxist revolutionary theory can then suppose that the animals will wrest control of the farm from the farmer just as the proletariat will wrest control of capital from the capitalists. An allegory is finally the exploitation of the entailments of a metaphor in narrative. 98

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Of course, not all the events of the book can be understood simply as entailments of the basic metaphor. An allegory will use other metaphors that have other their own webs of meanings and entailments. But an allegory is a genre that frames a text in such a way as to make everything within it and every described event open to a non-literal interpretation. Two more fundamental points can be made: 1 Readers or listeners do not need to challenge how they are operating in an extensive metaphor where little is allowed to be literal. They are content to operate in a metaphorical realm. 2 An allegory is a fiction that is constructed to convey a specific message, yet the nature or force of that message can be extended through the entailments of the metaphor. Allegories, and our need to discuss different interpretations of them, will already be familiar to many teachers of literature. Almost by stealth, they have also entered the language class. Morgan and Rinvolucri (1983) have recommended telling stories that appear allegorical in nature then ask students to discuss their interpretations of their meanings. Another technique is to retell very well-known stories and insist that they be interpreted as allegories. A need in this case is to demand strict equivalences where characters must stand for a concept or another person. Thus after establishing the idea of allegory, each character must be made to represent a concept or person. When students’ focus is disturbed by world events it is sometimes best to allow such events to dominate the class. So the teacher explains that they are going to tell the class a story about America, Europe and Iraq: Teacher:

Student: Teacher:

‘There was a girl who lived in a wood. She always wore a red cloak and that is why they called her little red riding hood.’ ‘We have that story in my language. It is an old story.’ ‘It is an old story about a new idea.’

And another student asks what ‘little red ………’ means. After the story itself has been disentangled, the teacher reminds the class of what the story is really about, then asks them who the characters are. Teacher: Student 1: Teacher:

‘Who is the wolf?’ ‘Saddam Hussein.’ (surprised) ‘Saddam Hussein?’

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Student 2: Student 1:

‘I think it is President Bush.’ ‘No.’ (shaking their head emphatically)

The teacher then asks each student to make a short speech saying why they think their character is who they are. The supporter of the ‘wolf is Saddam Hussein’ argument made the interesting observation: Student 1: Student 2: Student 1: Teacher:

‘This is not what I think.’ ‘So you think like me?’ ‘No, this is an American story. So the wolf is Saddam Hussein.’ ‘Ah, American propaganda!’

The first time I tried this I wanted a consensus as to what the story meant. I set out with the assumption that an allegory should have a single meaning. This denies the nature of allegory and thwarts the potential of the class. The second time, I asked each student to develop their own model with a group, for example: ‘Wolf ⫽ Saddam Hussein, Granny ⫽ people Saddam killed, Little Red Riding Hood ⫽ Kuwait, the father with his axe ⫽ President Bush’; versus ‘Wolf ⫽ President Bush, Granny ⫽ Afghanistan, Little Red Riding Hood ⫽ Saddam Hussein, the father with his axe ⫽ nearly everybody in the world’. In a final phase, students can practise critical writing by recounting the two interpretations then discussing which works best. Another issue that arises is why we use stories like this instead of always engaging with issues directly. A class such as that described gives part of the answer. Among a given group of international students, interest in even major international events can be uneven. Construed as an allegory, the children’s story first focuses interest upon how it should be interpreted. That interest transfers towards the scenarios into which it is interpreted. Teachers have traditionally understood how allegory has this power; allegory awakens understanding without providing a full construction of what is understood. This capacity is finally a property of the metaphors of which an allegory is a series of entailments.

Analogy An allegory is an analogical fiction. An allegory is quite a rare literary form that has the properties of an analogy. It begins with a metaphor such as ‘the farm is a pre-revolutionary society’, which confers a metaphorical significance on everything that occurs within its frame

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and upon all its actors. An analogy also begins with a metaphor, then explores the entailments and inferences of that metaphor. An analogy is not a constructed narrative genre, however. The narrative of an analogy represents a much broader approach to problem-solving. Allegories are analogies but analogies are not necessarily allegories. Analogies begin in metaphor. Like some metaphors their two domains have no resemblance to each other (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993: 450); but the two domains are analogous, not because they are unlike but because of how the relationship between them is developed. The analogy arises when the writer expresses the parallelism between two logical arguments or narratives that arise from each of the domains (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993). We can see this parallelism in Holyoak and Thagard’s analysis of a famous Galilean analogy. Galileo wanted to counter the assumption that dropping a stone from a tower proved the earth was not moving because the stone would fall to a point directly under the one from which it was dropped. Galileo used an analogy whose core metaphor can be analysed as ‘the world is a ship’. He argued that when you dropped a stone from the mast of a moving ship, the stone fell to the base of the mast. Therefore, by the same argument, the ship was not moving when everybody knew that it was (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995). Clearly there is no object or surface similarity between ‘the world’ and ‘a ship’. However, Galileo discovered a systematic set of relationships between an action performed in the world and in the ship. He further suggested a set of causative relationships in one domain, which mimicked those in another. Arguably, such causative parallelism makes the analogy more powerful (Tverski, 1977; Gentner and Ratterman, 1991). This is not to say that an event in the source domain is causing an event in the target domain. The point is that if the target domain and the source domain both have a structure, ‘if x happens then y’, they will establish a more systematic set of relationships (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993). We illustrate this parallelism in Figure 4.1. In both the source domain and the target domain of this analogy, the logical structures are virtually parallel. There is an observation, the fall of an object in what appears to be a vertical trajectory, and a false conclusion drawn from it. Yet the example also shows how the source domain of an analogy may have attributes that the target domain does not, and these attributes can be used to explore the target domain. It is a case of putting arguments in a novel context in order to see them better. In this case, that attribute is the fact that the movement of a ship can be observed.

102 Source ship

Target world

Drop an object from a mast and the object falls at the base of the mast

Drop an object from a tower and the object falls at the base of the tower

Therefore the ship is not moving

Therefore the world is not moving

But everybody knows the ship is moving Therefore this argument is flawed

Therefore this argument is flawed

Figure 4.1 Analogical structure

Generic space

Input

The ship, the mast, the falling ball, the deck where the ball falls

A moving ship mimics the movement of the world

Blend

The ship world, the ship’s perceived movement is the world’s unperceived movement

Figure 4.2 Galileo’s analogy as a blend

Input

The world, the tower, the falling ball, the place where the ball falls

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A more recent explanation of Galileo’s analogy would be provided by the blend-structure model shown in Figure 4.2. A successful analogy provides an inference about the target domain (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995), and it is this capacity for inference that makes analogy a powerful tool. In Galileo’s example the inference is ‘if the ship is moving the world could be moving’. We can see how the inference emerges from a blend model. The inference is a key feature that is not matched across the counterpart spaces; the tower and the mast are mapped onto each other, as is one falling ball onto another, and the deck or the ground where the balls fall. The ship has perceptible motion, however, and the world does not. Perceptible motion is left salient in the blend; it applies to the ship and the world or to a blended ship-world. This is how the analogy tells us that it was wrong to believe the argument that the near-vertical trajectory of a falling stone showed the earth to be motionless. In this way, analogues explore difficult arguments because they find new features which are not evident in the target domain itself. We can then use our capacity for inference to attribute those features to the obscurer nature of the target. We can see the movement of the ship, but we cannot observe the movement of the earth. This is why teachers will so often begin an elementary discussion of a difficult and unobservable phenomenon by likening its behaviour to something better known. Thus, physics teachers liken electricity to water or to crowds of moving people. Their students then ‘infer’ that passing a charge through a switch is like releasing water through a tap. This example reveals one of the traps of analogy. Their capacity to mislead with a false inference is as great as their capacity to enlighten us with one that is true. The analogue can also create future problems by setting up the expectation that a phenomenon will always behave like the substance to which it is compared (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993). We have to teach learners the power and the pitfalls of a given analogy. Certainly, there are inferences from the electricity–water analogy that have passed into the language. We speak of an electrical current for example. Teachers can encourage the exploration of the analogue; they can invite students to infer that switches are taps that allow an electrical current to flow, then demonstrate that the inferences are incorrect. Students need to learn both the benefits and limitations of analogy use. Language teachers can also help learners to build their vocabulary by leading them through systematic sets of inferences then also use these to demonstrate the points where these will lead them astray. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) suggest that we can help students to describe the circulation of the blood by showing them a central-heating system. The

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central-heating analogue helps students in temperate and arctic climates to develop a vocabulary that can be used in two domains: ‘pump, circulate, liquid, liquid carrying heat/oxygen, furred pipes/furred arteries’. It also simplifies a quite complicated process. Yet the analogy further serves as a method to underscore the distinct nature of processes that it says nothing about and hence to mark out the specialised nature of some of the lexis that must be used. Both the circulatory systems may have pumps, albeit of rather different kinds, and both force liquid through pipes, but oxygenation is unique to one. The analogue can thus provide a simplified lexical introduction that reveals the larger and more complex nature of what must be learnt. It also makes learners aware of the potential meanings of the lexis they learn, instilling an experimental cast of mind where words are tried out in different contexts. A key issue for all pedagogy is how to foster what Anne Brown (1989) calls the ‘functional flexibility’ that will result in analogical transfer. An overriding preoccupation with contemporary pedagogy is relevance. The question is how we make medieval history or Shakespeare relevant to contemporary learners in a modern secondary school. It could be, however, that the question of how to make subjects relevant is totally misconceived. The issue is how we can help learners achieve the flexibility of mind that finds the analogies and dis-analogies that form the conceptual networks that allow them to shift their thinking from what is familiar to what is remote; finding in likeness, difference. The objective should not be to distort remote experiences and ideas by making them similar to those that we know, but to encourage the deep-structure mapping between their matched features that will leave their fundamental distinctiveness intact. Working with very young children, Anne Brown demonstrated how a control-group that was trained in learning transfer would develop a greater capacity to solve new problems by treating them as an analogue of problems they had already solved. For example, they would be trained by teasing out the common underlying structure from similar stories that had different animal characters. Training in learning transfer should also form part of the curriculum of adult learners. One way to do this involves examining how we express analogical argument. The use of analogy in academic texts is largely neglected by current EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses and textbooks, even though it is something of a sub-genre, preferring certain forms of language. Analogy supports much academic argument, and tackling it in an EAP class can have the triple bonus of promoting techniques of learning transfer, advancing a critical

Allegory and Analogy 105

engagement with knowledge, and developing the linguistic expression of that engagement. In one approach I gave students a diagram based on the Galilean analogy described earlier. I asked them to recount what the analogy was telling us by using the diagram shown in Figure 4.1. A key grammatical structure was the first conditional, as is shown in the following successful uses of the structure: Student 1: (reading) ‘However, if we drop a stone from the mast of a moving ship the stone will also fall in a straight line.’ Student 2: (reading) ‘However, if it is the case of a moving ship, when we drop a stone from its mast, the stone will fall directly under the mast.’ It is also located in this failure to produce complete sentences in written summary: Student 3: (written) However, when we dropped a stone from a mast. The stone fell directly under a mast. Also important was the use of connectors to show the parallelism in the arguments: Student 3: ‘Similarly, although the stone fell directly under the tower, we cannot prove the earth could not be moving.’ The work raised the problem of controlling sentence structure in order to give the analogy’s inferential purpose a more meaningful expression: Student 3: ‘It shows the ship is moving therefore the earth could be moving.’ One complete text was as follows: Student 4: The question is to show whether the earth is moving or not. The problem is that if we drop a ball from a tower, it will go straight. If the earth is moving, it should drop at an angle. However, if we drop a stone from a mast of a moving ship, the stone will also fall in a straight line. Therefore the earth could be moving. The final inference was discussed and some students held it to be incorrect. The analogy did not show that the earth could be moving,

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only that the argument about a ball’s angle of fall showed nothing either way. The student defended their text on the grounds that they had used the conditional ‘could’. Another linguistic spin-off was the issue of how to pose questions or problems (the question is to show, the question is to ask, the problem is to know, the problem is to find, and so on). These errors also go to the heart of students’ conceptualisations of the meanings that underlie language. For example, they involve the understanding that ‘questions are talk’, and hence ‘asked’, or ‘buried objects’ that must be ‘raised’ but less commonly objects that can simply be ‘shown’. In another exercise I have given students the metaphor from which the analogy can be generated, ‘air is water’ for example. I have then asked them to map out the parallel arguments and draw out an inference in the same way as in the model shown. My objective was an inference about sound, but the first suggestions concerned balloons: Student: ‘Boats can go on the water because they are lighter than it is. Therefore balloons can go on air because they are lighter.’ To move in my intended direction I clapped my hands and said my hands had disturbed the air. I prompted further, saying the ‘wind disturbs …’, and after some difficulty I extracted: Student: (writes on the board) Some thing disturb water and makes waves. So we see, if something disturbs air it also make waves. And when they had finished writing I prompted again: Teacher: ‘Therefore …?’ Students: (awkward silence) I explained how analogies answered questions. I then asked the class if they could decide what question this analogy was answering. Finally their responses were distilled and corrected onto the board as follows: Teacher: (writes) The question is what is sound. Air is like water. Something disturbs water and makes waves. If something disturbs air it also makes waves.

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A final phase in analogy construction is the more ambitious attempt to persuade students to produce their own analogues. Working on the Galilean model with a group of Business Studies students, I asked them to find a core metaphor about their discipline. One of them produced the metaphor: Student:

‘Money is blood.’

I asked them to justify this. They explained that a company needed money to survive; another said ‘blood’ ‘went through the body and money went through the business’. Another student offered the term ‘circulate’. I then reminded them how Galileo had constructed his analogy in order to answer a question. Teacher: ‘What question are you asking?’ Student: (after some thought) ‘Do organisations need money?’ I accepted this question with some misgiving and then asked them to produce a paragraph using the Galilean model. I cite two of their texts, the more satisfactory version shows a stronger conceptual grasp of the purpose of analogy construction. The firmer grasp of the concept has gone hand-in-hand with a surer hold on the language required: Student 1: (written) The question is to show whether the company can survive or not. The problem is that if the blood doesn’t circulates through our body, we cannot live without blood. Therefore the organisation is in the same situation the organisation cannot survive without money. Student 2: (written) The problem is whether money is necessary to an organisation or not. The importance of money to an organisation is just like the significance of blood to a body. As you know, blood circulates the means of life. Similarly the movement of money enables the organisation to survive. We cannot live without money. Therefore an organisation cannot survive without money. I realised that by working back from the analogy rather than forward from the question we had done something false. Analogies answer questions, and their answers may pose further problems or reformulate what is being asked, but they need that starting point. However, language development had occurred and students had developed their argument strategies.

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I could have directed this analogy towards the common metaphor of money circulating in an economy as opposed to through an organisation. I could have looked at how obstructed circulation will lead to a sclerotic economy and developed the analogy further by considering the means of obstruction. In this sense, I would have seen the analogy less as an answer to one question and more in an exploratory role that is both posing and answering a series of questions about its topic. For example, a hypothetical and idealised exchange might unfold as follows: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher:

‘What does blood do when it circulates?’ ‘… carries oxygen to different parts of the body.’ ‘Is that circulation ever interrupted or impeded?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why is it interrupted or impeded?’ ‘The arteries are blocked.’ ‘What are the effects of blocked arteries?’

If I had used the entailments of the analogy to explore the topic in this way, I would probably have elicited a more natural process of analogy construction and expression. I would also have given students a greater insight into the potential of learning transfer to reveal new knowledge about topics. Classes can thus focus on the broader development of exploratory analogies. An interesting result could be a blend structure where there is less focus upon the separateness of topic and vehicle and more about how they are brought together to describe the topic in a single paragraph. Thus students who explore the circulation of money through that of blood can leave with a model such as the following: 55 Money is like blood to the economy. Its unimpeded circulation maintains the organisations that comprise an economy, promoting free exchange, trade and the transfer of energy towards the areas where it can be most effectively utilised. The result will be growth and prosperity. Impeding the circulation will result in economic sclerosis and the isolation of economic units, bringing the whole to general decline. A final phase might be to look critically at such a paragraph, showing how the identification of finance with blood, life and growth will promote a positive image of processes that may prove antithetical to long-term human survival.

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Morgan’s (1997) Images of Organisation, analyses how different types of organisation correspond to different metaphors. The metaphors provide useful series prompts from which to construct organisations that are appropriate to particular environments. The organic organisation, for example, with its intrinsic adaptability could be characterised as able to maintain itself in an unpredictable environment. As in other such exercises, the metaphor develops thought about the nature of organisation and the language through which that nature is expressed. The paragraph that blends the analogue and its topic, also reveals metaphor as a powerful and often neglected instrument for teachers who are helping students to achieve paragraph cohesion. I published an activity that achieved this by steering students towards an analogical construction of history (Holme, 1996). The procedure here was simply to ask students to draw history as a tree then to present their tree as if it were a theory of history. The tree form can be presented in many ways revealing different types of cultural bias both towards history and towards the prototype of the tree itself. Japanese students have produced elegant pines with a clear point marking out the Second World War and their consequent progression into an era of peace. A German physicist produced a deciduous fruit tree that they justified as increasingly chaotic and productive, to justify our changing perception of reality. Arab students placed Adam and Eve at the root. A finance student abstracted the image into something approaching the type of diagram to which trees lend their name. Students then collect the different presentations and write them up with one paragraph allocated to each model. The different versions of the tree metaphor exert a powerful organisational effect over the nature of the paragraphs produced; the common underlying theme holds together paragraphs that stress their thematic separateness. Subsequent discussions about cultural approaches to history can be invoked.

Analogues, models and writing instruction Holyoak and Thagard (1995) also discuss how analogies can be perceived as similar to models because of the isomorphic relationship between their two domains. As specified in Chapter 1, an isomorphic relationship means that when we perform an operation upon one component of a domain, the effect will be the same as if we perform it upon the other domain. Isomorphism is also a property of a model and its subject, and there is thus some room for confusion between what is meant by a model and

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an analogue (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995). Engineers may model the hull of a ship and put it in a wave tank. They will do this because they assume that the behaviour of the model when struck by waves will be the same as that of a much larger but equally proportioned object, provided that the ratio of the wave size and force to the boat’s size is maintained. Or, put very simply, if a model that has a draught of six centimetres is capsized by a wave of twelve centimetres we can imagine that the same craft with a draught of six metres will be capsized by a wave of 12 metres. This isomorphic relationship is what allows the capacity of analogy for inference. Thus, we can infer that the six-metre craft will be capsized by a 12-metre wave without having to build it in the way that Galileo inferred something about the unobservable movement of the earth by modelling it as the observable movement of a ship. Analogues and models therefore have common properties. However, the analogue is different in that it is not conceptually parasitic upon its target domain. In Galileo’s example, a ship is the world, but it is not, finally, a model of the world, remaining what it is. And it is the analogue’s retention of its conceptual integrity which gives it power. If it were a model of the earth, it could not act as a laboratory that made salient the property of movement while affording an observable trajectory of descent for a ball. The overlap between the analogue and the model can be seen in the diagrams that are commonly used to explain various features of discoursal structure to students of writing. These are like models in that they are diagrams which would be meaningless if they were removed from the process they illustrate. However, they are often analogical in that they make a metaphorical statement about text, placing it in domains that attach qualities it does not really possess in order to make inferences about its properties. Thus we speak of vertical or horizontal argument structures, for example. According to the vertical-argument-structure metaphor, a vertical argument will provide a complete version of argument x, then offer another paragraph which counters it with argument y. A horizontal argument structure shifts back and forth between arguments, more as a dialogue countering one point with another. The model in Figure 4.3 teaches vertical argument structure. It advises the student to open with an introduction then set up a main argument in favour of a position, using appropriate sources. Students next summarise an argument against that position. If they choose, they can then counter this second argument, perhaps by using more recent sources, thus shoring up the opening stance. They can then further question that counter.

Allegory and Analogy 111 Introduction Argument 1 (summarise with sources) Argument 2 (summarise with sources) Optional counter argument 2 (summarise with sources) Optional counter-counter argument 2 (reinforcing argument 1) (summarise with sources)

Balancing discussion (conclusions)

Figure 4.3 Argument essay structure

The model is also an analogue, however. First, it uses a downward progression, mimicking the direction of writing and reading. Second, it boxes the textual moves in order to assert their separateness from each other. Third, it reinforces the vertical-argument analogy by moving down the page in the direction of the text. The analogical content of the model is made stronger by the ‘balancing’ conclusion. This metaphor is given explicit form by the suggestion of a weight that anchors the descending structure with its balanced conclusion and final opinion. The student’s closure should balance the structure with an assessment of both sides of the argument. A text frame such as that for the introduction to a research article illustrated in Figure 4.4 shows the student how to apply the introduction step of the outline model shown in Figure 4.3. The frame is based on Swales’ (1990) genre model of writing instruction. Swales suggests that a text’s genre can be identified by how it will fulfil various functions in a given sequence, these functions are called moves. The pedagogical sequence suggested here is one of move identification, move exemplification and move production. Thus, in the first step, students are introduced to the concept of a textual move as a constituent of a given genre,

112 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching Introduction content General statement about the topic sentence

In this chapter, I present a fine-grained analysis of a videotaped lesson segment of a Form 2 (Grade 8) English reading lesson in a school located in a working-class residential area of Hong Kong.

Summary of method

The excerpt was taken from a large corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over 3 consecutive weeks.

Summary of results

The analysis shows how these limited English-speaking Cantonese children subverted an English reading lesson that had a focus on practical skills of factual information extraction from texts, and negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by artfully making use of the response slots of the Initiation-Response-Feedback discourse format used in the lesson. The analysis shows the students’ playful and artful verbal practices despite alienating school reading curriculum that seems to serve to produce uncritical labour.

Summary of conclusions

The implications for teaching are discussed.

Figure 4.4 Text frame showing a model research article introduction (text from Mei Yi Lin, 2001: 19)

in this case the research article introduction. They are then provided with a move sequence and asked to identify the portions of a text that correspond to each move. They would not, as here, copy the text into the appropriate box, but simply indicate where each section begins and ends. In this step, we can again see how a model-based instructional method shifts towards an analogue-shaped one. By entering even parts of a text into the appropriate move-box, the student conceives of a text as sectioned by its changes in function. In other words, the text blends with its analogue. In the next stage the class will identify any linguistic features that may be used to realise the moves. The locative reference to the type of text, ‘in this chapter’ and the use of a first-person present simple in a contemporary genre ‘I present’ are two obvious examples. I reinforce the use of a text model as an analogue in the lesson’s last stage by asking the student to write their own introduction to a research topic in the boxes. If they are forced to actually put their text into the appropriate parts of the diagram, then the sectioning furnishes them with the inferences that they cannot write too much for a given move and must respect the way in which the genre is sectioned.

Allegory and Analogy 113

Swales’ (1990) genre model and the pedagogical method that it suggests is itself a clear example of how analogy-based teaching enters the classroom. Swales’ was conscious that any given genre model has only limited application to the large variety of texts that are actually produced. Yet Swales’ pedagogical justification for a model that does not have the applicability one might hope for lies in Rosch’s (1978) prototype theory. Swales’ objective is to provide his students with a prototypical model of a genre such as a research article introduction. Just as the ‘robin’ anchors the American category of a bird, so Swales’ prescriptive model of an introduction anchors the quite varied forms that a student will actually produce in response to the different types of subject matter with which they have to deal. One can also treat these differing treatments of a prototypical form as analogues of each other, achieving counterpart mapping in their structural similarities and a final likeness in difference. In Figure 4.5, I consider how this genre model could be constructed as producing sets of close or distant analogues according to CBT.

Generic space

Emerging model of the text Input

Input

Raw notion of what the writer wishes to say

Mapping of prototypical genre features on to matched aspects of the writer’s topic Blend

Textual product

Figure 4.5 Applying genre models as blend structures

Prototypical genre model (e.g. introduction, method, conclusions, results)

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The diagram exemplifies a process, it does not specify the steps needed to construct a particular genre. The input space would contain the prototype, which would consist of the trace features of its illustrative text. In other words, it would not be an extracted set of ‘moves’ but a halfschematised exemplification of them. These illustrated moves would find counterparts in the writer’s notion of what they want to say. The blend would be a textual product that both shares the matched features and introduces new elements able to express the unique nature of a given subject. A pedagogical implication of this process is the need to deal less in abstracted generic structures and more in prototypical examples of them. Some more recent approaches to teaching the patterns of discourse are less compromising in their treatment of models as analogues. For example, Swales and Feak’s (1996) book on academic writing uses an ‘hourglass model’ to show how a paragraph moves from a general topic sentence through specific exemplification then back to a more general summary or conclusion. Tonfoni (1994) tried to create diagrammatic or pictorial representations of different written genres; thus, narratives had a vertical or ‘tree’ structure and students would create the genre by writing the part represented by a particular box into the box itself. In this way, the constraints imposed on the writer by framing their discourse inside the visual plan reminded them of what they should be writing and forced them to deal with all the attributes of a given form. A variation on Tonfoni’s idea can be built around the common expression of argument structures as vertical or horizontal. In order to encourage students towards vertical structures and the kind of critical appraisal that argumentation requires, they may be given a controversial text and asked to write a summary of it into a central box (Figure 4.6). Then they should write critical notes against points in the wings of the box. This construction is then transposed into a vertical argument structure where the summary paragraph is edited and the critical margin notes are rewritten as a counter-argument. The use of numbered points in the first summary box also forces the student to break down an argument into its core enumerated points before they are asked to employ the linking words (first, second, finally, also, further) that such a genre may require. Goatly (2000) has developed the characterisation of paragraph types according to different types of spatial metaphors. Thus ‘the stack’ supposes the placing of one point on another as blocks, while ‘the stair’ sees progression as connected by external context as in a narrative but with an increased sense of the independence of each event from the other. In ‘the stair’ the events form ascending steps that rest on framework that is

Allegory and Analogy 115 Counter arguments

Main argument

Counter arguments

1 2 3 Main argument

Figure 4.6 Argument structure modelling: from horizontal to vertical argument

provided from elsewhere. The student can thus infer that in this structure one point does not sustain another, instead a context, or the framework of ‘the stair’, sustains all of the points. Whether by cultural background or personal predisposition, some students find it difficult to grasp the idea that they should impose overt and inorganic structures on their discourse. The very concept of these abstract structures can itself be difficult to grasp. For them, an introduction to genre-based pedagogy can be achieved by embedding the metaphor of a discourse structure in the second more concrete metaphor of a plan. An opening approach can be with drawings showing precarious or poorly planned buildings where it is difficult to find one’s way from one room to another. At a second stage, I have asked colleagues to work with diagrams where students plan their work like a building. The hall was the introduction, leading to a central corridor that had two rooms on each side and one at the end, opposite the hall. The corridor represented metatextual links that marked the shift from one room to another. It was made clear that these links had to be clarified verbally. Each room represented a separate sub-topic, and the students were grouped and each group asked to produce specimen topic sentences that introduced the theme of each room. They were asked to call the end room ‘conclusions’, and to predict what these would be. Finally, they were asked to show a way out into the garden behind.

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The positive reaction of some colleagues to this activity surprised me because I had wondered if the extended metaphor of a house plan was not in some way redundant. However, the building plan and the associated metaphor of a building through which students must be conducted may provide a concrete and thus more powerful method of communicating the idea of structure. Diagrams simply represent abstract structures. Recognising how a building gives the structure tangible form, two colleagues transposed the plan to a poster-sized sheet of paper and pasted essay paragraphs into the appropriate rooms, the introduction into the hall, for example. They then asked students to write an appropriate metatext that linked sections into the corridor. They even reported that a new verb, ‘to corridor’ (different sections) had entered their metalanguage. The approach also leads forward to another area that receives a more extensive treatment in the next chapter, that of the metatext with which the writer guides the reader through their text. Presenting the text as a building sets up the writer as a figure who can guide the reader through the discourse that they will temporarily inhabit. A very different but no less powerful analogy through which to help students understand the rhetorical structure of some written genres can be developed from ‘the essay is a dialogue metaphor’. Such a description returns us to the manner in which classical and Renaissance philosophical texts would unfold as a dialogue with characters questioning and answering each other. Teachers may ask their students to begin writing discursive texts as a dialogue constructed between the members of a group. The students will next have to edit the strands of the dialogue together, either as a vertical or horizontal paragraph structure. The paragraph structures can themselves be reflected in the type of forum in which the discussion is unfolded. The structures mimic the dichotomy between a ritualised debate where one person speaks then another rises to counter them (vertical), and an argument that swings back and forth between point and counterpoint (horizontal). An even larger and less examined area encompasses the analogies that students use to conceptualise language-learning itself. Grammar-based approaches to language may overstress its systematicity, positing an ordered process of acquisition proceeding like a well-planned campaign. The campaign metaphor may itself make the assumption that events will unfold in a way that reality will quickly show to be unwarranted. Alternatively, ‘the language is talk’ metaphor may leave students with a knowledge that suddenly proves too fragile to sustain the conscious manipulation required to express a difficult point.

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The wrong metaphors could foster the illusion that progress will be rapid or easy, intensifying the sense of disillusion when it is found to be otherwise. Advanced or intermediate students often begin intensive courses with the sense that their progress will be rapid, simply because the move from elementary to intermediate is easily discernible. They sense that they are on the edge of a proper control of their target language then wonder why they have not attained it. Their expectation of rapid progress can swiftly lead to disillusionment as they come to believe that they are making no progress at all. One solution to this sometimes baseless disillusionment is to help students track back over their own learning. A more successful method, still, is for them to plot their position as their course unfolds, leaving a record that they can constantly review. The cartographic metaphor can be given physical form. Students can be asked to draw a map of where they are going to go in a language, representing it not just as a future set of obstacles but also of discoveries (Holme, 1996). They can then redraw the map in order to make it reflect the experiences that they have. The speculative linguistic landscape can be reorganised around the scenery that is actually encountered. If they keep learner diaries, then these can become the journals of an individual response to a collective voyage. Another more powerful use of the same analogy involves the class in drawing a learning map as an ascent then discussing the point that they have reached when starting and finishing a given course. Some students underestimate their own progress, wanting to formulate language as if it were any other form of subject knowledge where their progress can be measured by turning the leaves of the book. A way to overcome this negative mind-set is to discuss expressive obstacles that have been overcome. Perhaps the greatest challenge for any language teacher is coping with fossilisation, which generally sets in among late starters at the higher intermediate level. The classic metaphor for this is the plateau, which can be drawn into any language map. A coping strategy may involve a broader cognitive development or a learning task which confronts the learner with the inadequacies of their expressive capabilities. The teacher can then use the map analogy to show how moving off the plateau involves extending the student’s expressive need with content learning. In sum, analogy enters the discourse of all successful language instruction. It proffers both a way in which to help students conceptualise the task they must accomplish and the means of that accomplishment. The task can be the global one of an ascent of language; it can also be about how we frame each of the pedagogical steps that this ascent requires.

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Teaching with analogy: conclusions This chapter, has looked at how students are ready to treat texts as extended metaphors that unfold as narratives, or as allegories in other words. It has considered how the treatment of texts as allegories is a useful way to steer students towards a critical appraisal of them and to foster debate in the language class. It then turned to the issue of how to distinguish an analogy from a metaphor and decided that an analogue is a type of metaphor which has developed a common relational structure to the topic it describes. Next it looked briefly at the very large role that analogy plays in learning and in the language class in particular. We should also remember that proverbs such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ also map relationally onto their target domain. For example, when a mechanic advises an apprentice that ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ they are not asserting a similarity relationship between sewing and car mechanics, but what Ortony (1993) calls a proportional relationship based upon a shared argument. According to this view, we can modify our last argument that proverbs are vehicles looking for a topic and perceive them more precisely as analogues in search of a situation with which they can establish a proportional relationship. Finally: 1 All analogies arise from a metaphor, or a blend of two domains. 2 Not all metaphors are analogies. 3 In order to become an analogy, the domains of the metaphor need development in an isomorphic parallelism from which inferences can be drawn. 4 Analogies and models share the property of isomorphism in respect of their target domain, but models are conceptually parasitic upon the target. A model explores the potential behaviour of that which it models. Analogies furnish their target domain with a context inside which that domain can be perceived anew. 5 Our capacity to draw inferences about the target domain from the source domain gives analogy a powerful role in how we argue and reason about the world. Inference allows us to reason about what we cannot know directly as a result of the events that we perceive. We can perceive movement in a ship; we can never perceive the movement of the earth. Therefore we must infer properties about the movement of the earth from the movement of a ship.

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In sum, analogy may finally be a form of metaphor, but it is an important concept because of how it reveals new properties within some metaphors while showing their potential as a tool to develop thought. The use of analogy is an essential part of the remit of those who foster language development as a key to all education.

5 Teaching Lexis through Metaphor

The last three chapters focused upon the types of metaphor that would be recognised by traditional rhetorical analysis. Only when examining metonymy did I start to look directly at how figures of speech expose the mechanisms that underpin meaning formation and manipulation in what would normally be considered literal language. However, each of these chapters did carry us away from their surface focus upon figurative forms and towards a wider interest in the processes that such forms reveal. For example, we understood how teachers who encourage the use of figurative language can help students to connect their development of a second language (L2) to the emotional content of their lives and hence to the expression of the concerns that matter to them. In this chapter I focus on those cognitive processes more directly, advancing a wider view as to how they should modify our approach to language teaching.

Bridging the gap between learning theory and language theory Recent approaches to language teaching have been constructed out of the following areas of study: ● ● ● ●

●

Classical grammar. Structuralism and behaviourism. (Systemic) functional linguistics. Tasks which by reflecting authentic contexts of use can stimulate real communicative need. Theories of second-language acquisition (SLA). 120

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The last three phases have not produced pedagogical theories that can be called singular or consistent. Communicative methodology, for example, divides into what Howatt (1984) calls the weak and the strong approaches. The weak supposes an interest in how we use grammar and lexical phrases to realise a given communicative function such as telling a story. The strong communicative approach adopts an overriding concern with helping students to express meaning at the expense of accuracy. It suggests a meaning-focused approach where students are distracted from thinking about language per se by their need to use it in problem-solving tasks, or Prabhu’s (1987) ‘procedures’. In this case, ‘the invented example’, whose objective is to put forward a given function, notion or structure, was replaced by ‘bits of language lifted from their original context’ or student-generated text (Cook, 2000: 189). Strong communicative approaches also seek theoretical support from secondlanguage acquisition theory. They do this because they stress the mind’s ability to acquire language from unstructured input rather than from rule-focused practice. Language acquisition is, if anything, an even more divergent area of study than language-teaching methdology. At one extreme, SLA theory is based upon Krashen’s (1985) distinction between two processes: ●

●

conscious learning, resulting in a monitored and hesitant use of language; and unconscious acquisition where learners rediscover the faculties that helped them to acquire their first language.

At the other end of the SLA spectrum, scholars such as Ellis (1990) and Pienemann (1998) have shown a considerable interest in what are called cognitive strategies; that is, in the learning processes that students employ in order to understand and reuse language. For them, a complete dichotomy between the natural and unconscious process of acquisition and the conscious and artificial procedures of learning would be false. This has resulted in such contradictory concepts as ‘instructed second-language acquisition’ (Ellis, 1990) where instruction is held to bring about a process from which it should technically be considered separate. There is no clear relationship between communicative language teaching theory and acquisition theory. On the one hand, the emphasis of communicative theory is upon the social use of language and its analysis as implementing social goals. On the other hand, we can say that the primary conclusion to be drawn from Krashen’s (1985, 1989) theory of acquisition is that the conscious analysis of language

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according to any criteria is not useful for language students. What is needed is a ‘natural approach’ (Krashen and Terrell, 1983) where a class is really a process of exposure to the comprehensible second language input upon which the students’ faculties will work without pedagogical stimulation. Therefore, if we were to simplify current language-teaching approaches we could find them divided between: 1 A descriptive theory that regards language as a social construct and hence treats language learning as a process of socialisation in the language. 2 A psycholinguistic theory that treats language description as irrelevant to effective acquisition or actually obstructive of it. Such a theory implies that learners should ignore the nature of the phenomenon with which they have to grapple. Behaviourist learning theory proposed a more unified picture. Language learning for Skinner (1957) was a process of habit formation; a linguistic habit consists of knowing what words mean and knowing how they slot into the grammatical patterns or structures of which language is composed. Habits are obtained in respect of the structures of language through a process of constant reinforcement. In the language class, this reinforcement may take the form of pattern drilling. Behaviourist theories of language were only able to unite learning theory and language description by oversimplifying or even falsifying the nature of both the learning process and the nature of language. Yet the rejection of the behaviourist view has left teachers with a fractured theoretical base. Teachers can draw upon an increasingly elaborate understanding of the social use of language in order to build a more socially relevant syllabus. At the same time, teachers are asked to accommodate a view of acquisition where their objective is simply to provide comprehensible input without it being mediated by our growing awareness of how form realises a given context (see for example Krashen, 1985, 1989; Krashen and Terrell, 1983). This view of acquisition has more recently been studied and explained by the frame of generative grammar (Cook, 1993; Schwartz, 1987; Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994). The emerging discipline of cognitive linguistics and the study of metaphor is not about describing language. The interest is in studying language in order to reveal the conceptual processes that build it. As Deacon (1997) has stressed, we can treat languages as products of an evolutionary pressure, or of a Darwinian need for the cognitive ‘fitness’

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that ensures their survival. In order to continue and develop, languages must be passed down and acquired. The construction of language must therefore be tuned to the nature of the mind that has to acquire it. The keys to the nature of the language acquisition may rest with the cognitive hooks that are embedded in a language in order to make it easier to learn or acquire. Metaphor, as the mechanism that reveals how grammatical and abstract meanings have been constructed in language, may constitute one of those hooks. Metaphor is a linguistic clue to how the mind structures meaning. Metaphor is also a manifestation of cognitive processes that are central to our capacity to generalise our learning and to make a creative response to new circumstances. Metaphor can, thus, stand as a link between the nature of language and the nature of the learning process. Metaphor both explains the nature of what is given in language and suggests the processes of how we adapt its inherited resources to what is new and strange. If metaphor uncovers a process where we conceptualise new knowledge by framing it inside what is already known, then metaphor is implicit in how we construct learning. Yet language is a product of that conceptualisation process. We can see this in very basic procedures where we teach the meanings of words through the metaphors from which those meanings have emerged. The current emphasis from followers of the lexical approach upon lexical chunks, lexical phrases and collocates can be further rationalised as furnishing the learner with a sense of the grammatical role that lexis is inclined to negotiate. For example, we should not teach the term ‘focus’ as a metatextual term meaning to ‘consider closely’ that is shorn of its metaphorical roots. We should not teach ‘focus’ at all. We should teach ‘focus on an object’ as a visual process of clarification. The collocation, ‘focus on’, will emerge not as some lexical coincidence but as the only response to the metaphor that underpins the expression. Many teachers may notice how learners overuse some of these chunked phrases, whether or not they are taught this way. The visual metaphor for ‘focus on an idea’ is immediately plain, deriving from ‘knowledge is sight’ and ‘what you know is what is seen – or focused on’, and this makes ‘focus on’ both memorable and low-risk. ‘Low risk’, because the quite regular grammatical collocation ‘focus ⫹ on’ means that students can easily incorporate into its transparent metaphor the propositions that unfold from it. ‘Memorable’, because without prompting the student can restore it to the knowledge-is-sight metaphor through which their mother tongue will also have conceptualised understanding. Students may gravitate to meanings whose construction

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is made transparent by the salience of the metaphor through which it is conceptualised. If this is the case then the teacher should remember that making those metaphors evident is a powerful method of putting across a lexical meaning.

Using metaphor to teach abstract meaning Teachers often search for contexts of use that will make students understand a given meaning. A more helpful technique may involve building that context out of the word’s metaphorical origins. The student can thus connect the term to the processes out of which its meaning has been created. For example, a student once took me away from the study of a written text by asking for the meaning of the word ‘substantiate’. I turned first to the core meaning of the word, tapped the table and asserted how that had ‘substance’. The student knew the word ‘solid’, and asked if ‘substance’ was a synonym. I hesitated, said ‘no’ and carried the explanation closer to the term’s core meaning. Somewhat inaccurately I wrote on the board that ‘substances were the things from which everything was made’. Although inaccurate, the statement marked out an area of meaning and no one sought to question this, perhaps because the need to think metaphorically was implicitly understood. Latching on to the schematic origins of a term can also encourage the student to explore related expressions. Having explained the physical nature of ‘substance’ I therefore said that we treated certain things, people and even ideas as if they lacked ‘substance’ or were ‘insubstantial’. I explained how words such as ‘empty’ or ‘vacuous’ can be applied to character and other abstract concepts. The word ‘ghost’ was mentioned as if to frame the group’s sense of something that was not there. I asked if the students could think of an insubstantial argument. The request did not stimulate a response until somebody simply said ‘a ghost argument’, which I corrected to ‘ghostly argument’ and at once regretted having dwelt on this supernatural reference. I explained that a ghostly argument suggested an argument with a certain power to change opinion; ‘as if by gliding into the mind’, I might have said. An insubstantial argument could not be credited with such a power. Understanding the metaphor can help students conceptualise some of the issues with which it deals. Knowing that arguments can be insubstantial raises the question of when and how they are. Accordingly, I asked everybody to write down something that they believed to be true, and for each student to state their arguments in turn. The arguments

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ranged from the need to ‘cut the necks’ of murderers to the belief that University accommodation was too expensive. I asked students to think how they might ‘substantiate’ a colleague’s argument. As an example, I told them that the argument, ‘we should execute murderers’ was somewhat ‘insubstantial’ unless one could show that this reduced the murder rate. The student who had made the original statement objected to the effect that it was a moral issue, and that those who took life had to lose their own life. I seized on this statement and showed how the student had ‘substantiated’ their first argument. I then tried to represent the argument by drawing a balloon on the board, showing that it should be tethered to a set of supporting ideas or facts (Figure 5.1). The case here represents an extended diversion from a class caused by difficulties with one word; the problem was how to explain an abstract meaning. The solution was to return to a core sense, the one from which the abstract usage had been metaphorically extended. This return was more than a straightforward act of explaining one meaning through another, it meant a venture into the larger schematisation of which the word was merely a part. A larger area of abstract language, involving the notion of ‘weight’ for seriousness (gravity) and the resulting conceptualisation of argument and opinion was broached but perhaps not fully exploited. The key point is that if teachers have such insights they can often find ways to structure the presentation of lexis in class and then help students integrate it into the grammatical forms with which it will commonly co-occur.

Execute murderers!

It is morally wrong to let somebody live if they have taken a life Figure 5.1 Teaching abstract lexis through concrete metaphors: ‘substantial’ arguments

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Metaphor therefore allows us to understand the nature of language as a series of strata that carries frozen within it clues to the nature of learning. We can now hold in prospect a theory that links what the student has to learn to the process through which they will learn it.

Metaphor teaches students about language Looking at the metaphors from which a meaning has emerged means asking students to take a diachronic look at language. When I taught the meaning of substance I did not explicitly raise the issue of how languages develop meaning over time. Yet some students will respond well to this type of linguistic awareness-raising. I took a more conscious look at how to uncover the metaphors that build meaning with a class who were mostly English majors and studying language and culture on an exchange visit. I assumed that they would be more willing to focus upon the nature of the target language itself. I used a lesson built out of the following popular text about language: 56 [A] ploughman eats looking out to sea. Between bites, he half consciously notices that the land he’s already ploughed is choppy, as the sea is today. Out at sea is a ship, the one human ‘civilising’ presence on the sea’s wide surface, as his plough is on this lonely stretch of land. He notices how the ship’s bow-wave resembles the earth turned up to either side of his plough’s blade, and how its wake resembles one of his furrows. It pleases him to perceive these similarities between earth and sea, plough and ship. Perhaps he imagines himself to be the first man on earth who ever made the connection. And perhaps he is. More probably, however, he is only one of a long succession of millions of men to whom the same idea has occurred. Ships have long been said to plough the sea, and ploughs to sail the earth. In a variant of the same ancient metaphor the modern French faucher le grand pre for sailing is literally to reap, or to mow, the big field; the reapers too leave a wake behind them. Language certainly embodies the perception of a ship as a plough. It does in the word ‘dock’, formerly ‘dok’. That word now names the place where ships are tethered to the land, but it originally meant a ploughed furrow. When a ship beaches itself, its keel ploughs a furrow in the wet shore and before there were developed docking facilities for ships, they would be brought to land on a beach. (Adapted from N. Lewis, The Book of Babel. London: Viking, 1994: 82)

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Before introducing the text, I gave the class an etymological enigma. Like all enigmas, this one began with a question: Teacher:

When large ships come into land, they come into a dock. ‘Dok’ is the old word for a plough furrow. How did dock come to mean a place built to receive ships?

Students were unused to this type of exercise and did not respond. They were used to having language presented to them as a fait accompli, as something that simply exists rather than as a solution to the communicative needs of a culture as it develops over time. I therefore led them into the riddle with a couple of questions: Teacher:

Student: Teacher:

Student 2: Teacher: Student 2: Teacher:

‘Imagine a time when there were no docks or artificial harbours. How did sailors bring ships into land when there are no docks?’ ‘They put them on the … coast?’ ‘The beach, on the beach. They drew them up on the beach. Right, so what happens when you pull a ship up on the sand?’ ‘It is hard.’ ‘So you push back the sand. What does plough mean?’ ‘It’s for growing food.’ ‘But what do you do when you plough?’

The class then found the solution. Collectively they told how ships pulled up on the beach had ploughed a furrow or a ‘dok’. More inventively, they concluded that this had given an exhausted crew the idea of ploughing a permanent furrow into which the boat could simply float. This ‘dok’ became a ‘dock’. I had to say that this was etymologically speculative but pointed out how the example was a brilliant illustration of the role of metaphor in thought experiments and invention. Next, I asked students to think how ploughing a field and sailing the seas are alike. Again, responses were slow and they asked leading questions. I recycled another question in a different way: Teacher:

‘Can you describe what happens when you plough a field?’

This time it was understood after some prompting: Student:

‘I cut the ground.’

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And the answer provided an important platform: Teacher: ‘When you cut into the ground, what else happens to it? You make, make … ’ Student: (gestures with his hands to show a furrow) Teacher: ‘A wave?’ With a push from the teacher, the class had found the grounds of similarity between ploughed land and wind-swept sea. When the main text was introduced, students were asked to think about how far ploughing and sailing had achieved a metaphorical relationship in their own languages. After reading the text, students were given the diagram shown in Figure 5.2. I told them how we often describe the movement of ships as if they were ploughs. I said that the language in the left-hand rectangle was generally used to describe ships while that in the right was about ploughing fields. Their task was to attempt to describe the movement of ships in as many ways as possible by taking language from the right and using it with that of the left. They were then given the example ‘the ship ploughed through the sea’. The sea

is

the field

the plough the ship plough the field waves

wake

plough a furrow in the ground

sail

ploughman

steer

the plough furrowed the ground

a course (it ploughed through the ground)

Figure 5.2 Understanding the origins of words: from plough furrow to dock

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A sentence, ‘the ship ploughed a way through the sea’ was produced, leading to the teaching of ‘wake’. I dismissed an odd one, ‘the ship sailed like a plough in the ground’, too quickly. I did not see that it could have led to a discussion of how metaphors are only meaningful when they suppress some of the features of their source and target domain. ‘Ships lift the sea as ploughs do the earth’, but ‘ploughing into the ground’ can bring flying objects to a halt. Yet this direction began to emerge later and without direction. The group discussed the sentences that were most effective and interestingly these mostly correlated with what one would expect to be common usage. Somebody attempted a reverse mapping with ‘plough is like ship in the field’, and it was agreed that ploughs are not like ships even though ships can be like ploughs. This stimulated the thought that the entire analogy was odd since ships connoted free and uninhibited movement while ploughs suggested something laborious (a word supplied by the teacher and explained as deriving from the Latin for plough). This exercise worked well with an advanced group who had a commitment to the study of the language. Teachers working towards run-of-the-mill communicative objectives might see a class dedicated to exploring how language achieves meaning as a distraction from their proper objective. Yet such an objection characterises the weakness of the communicative ethos. Language does not present as a series of episodic chunks, each locked into a given scenario. A language represents networks of extensible meanings that can be driven across different but analogous contexts. Teachers must think more about how they can stimulate that conceptual movement.

Using metaphor in the construction of discourse Students come across their target language as a baffling and randomly shaped construction, as something that is simply there. Further thought about the processes of that language’s emergence and the traces that these processes leave behind can help them to recognise its underlying systematicity. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this recognition entails a capacity to grasp the conceptual metaphors that give language this systematicity then to unfold related meanings from them. With greater awareness of both the schemas underlying all language and those underlying a particular language, students can participate in the creative process out of which we generate the expressions that appear aberrant or idiomatic. They can thus establish a framework that can impose sense and order where there appeared to be none.

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In an earlier and related argument, Lindstromberg (1991) asked teachers of English for Specific Purposes to pay greater heed to the metaphors around which some specialised discourse may be structured. Dudley Evans and St John (1998) also suggested that conceptual metaphor could become an instrument that would help us understand the specificity of a given form of discourse. Our conceptualisation of business as warfare will mean that business and warfare sometimes share the same forms of expression. The concept of liquid as cash evolving from ‘liquid is movement’ also furnishes some part of the discourse of finance, both as the idiomatic ‘milk a cash cow’, or the more technical: ‘to liquidise assets’, or its contrary, ‘frozen assets’. Additionally, an awareness of metaphor can help students adopt a critical stance towards text because it helps foster an understanding of how rhetoric is used in order to advance a given authorial purpose. Goatly (2000) has also constructed exercises that help students understand how metaphor colours the topic in a particular way or restricts the reader’s thoughts to certain conceptual channels. Students may also find a linkage between the study of metaphor as a cohesive device and metaphor as an expression of the author’s ideological purpose. For example, in the text below there is a very active schematisation of trade/business both as war and a concomitant reification of ‘globalisation’ as an object moving with unstoppable force. Such a metaphorical structure may help to hold the text together as a vehicle that also conveys the writer’s outraged sense of how free trade is unleashing a chaotic change to which the reader is likely to fall victim. Commerce, like cash, is also a liquid: 57 What are they putting in our food these days? And how can we avoid it? Whether it’s antibiotics in the chickens and pigs we buy from Europe, or growth hormones fed to the cows whose beef we buy from America, the new era of globalised free trade is taking down the barriers to importing these dubious additives. While we may be able to remove antibiotics from European imports, if we can convince Brussels to act, it is more difficult with the United States of America. Twice this year [1998], Europe has been at odds with the US, with the world’s only remaining superpower imposing swingeing sanctions to get its way, backed by the World Trade Organisation. And in both cases the trade disputes with America have been ethical. In the Banana War, the right of Britain to protect the livelihoods of its former colonies by preferentially purchasing Carribean bananas

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grown on small environmentally friendly farms rather than South American bananas grown on the huge estates of the Americanowned multinationals, was denied. In the Beef War, Britain supports the US in its demand that the EU should open its markets to hormone-treated beef, which has been banned in the EU for eleven years because of worries over health risks, particularly with respect to laboratory tests which suggest that hormone-treated beef may be carcinogenic. Because Britain is an ally of the US in this particular skirmish, goods from this country have not been included in the list of European products which have been subject to 100 percent retaliatory tariffs since 29 July. Instead, luxury food products from France, Germany, Denmark and Italy are under attack, the livelihoods of people who have nothing to do with beef production are threatened in order that the US can continue to pursue its ideological commitment to free trade alongside its rather less ideological commitment to the greater concentration of wealth within its shores. (The Independent newspaper, 1998, my emphasis) Thus, the ‘era of free trade’, is the sentence’s reified subject that is flattening every ‘barrier’ and ‘opening’ markets. Arguments (disputes) are ‘war’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) with livelihoods ‘threatened’ or ‘under attack’ and Europe ‘skirmishing’ with America on the topic of beef. Before approaching such a text, teachers can ask students to consider the alternative types of metaphor that the text may use. A written instruction to a class might be: The writer uses the following ways of talking about their subject: Trade is a kind of war (Britain is an ally of the USA). Trade is lubrication or a flow of fluids (wealth is concentrated). 1 Find language that uses these ideas directly. 2 Look at the other types of language that these uses encourage. For example, ‘if trade is liquid then barriers will interrupt its flow’. Find these kinds of phrases in the text. The second question was an attempt to hunt down the more remote entailments of a central metaphor. Thus if ‘business is war’ and if a given dispute makes ‘allies’ of such parties as the USA, Britain and the World Trade Organisation, they must then ‘back’ each other ‘up’. A concluding discussion can ask how the dominance of the business-is-war metaphor

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over ‘commerce is a liquid’ situates the text in respect of its reader, giving it a sense of combative outrage. By asking students to search for the dominant metaphorical themes in text, teachers can train them in the identification of key conceptual metaphors in the language they have to deal with. Students can start to formulate their own conceptual metaphors then use them to identify the expressions that the target language reveals to them. They can use a conceptual metaphor to group the metaphor’s different lexicogrammatical realisations, perhaps using a form of mind-map on the lines shown in Figure 5.3. In this example, a group of phrases are clustered around the conceptual metaphor of trade or business as war. However, notions of conflict beget other conceptualisations of ‘dispute’ and argument. For example, ‘peace is an equilibrium or balanced state’ leads to ‘conflict is instability’. This gives us such phrases as ‘at odds with’ where being in a condition of ‘unevenness’ connotes conflict. Obviously, students are unlikely to derive this conceptualisation unaided. However, a pedagogical ‘steer’ can help them to map out the series of conceptualisations that underpin the texts that they study. They will thus start to organise lexis according to schema from which it has emerged. Another common principle in lexical teaching is also underpinned. This is that we should teach lexis as elements that interrelate within Britain is at odds with the USA Peace is an equilibrium conflict is unbalanced

Resulting in regional instability

Banana/Beef war

X is an ally of Y in this particular skirmish

Business and trade are war X, Y and Z are under attack

Protect the (livelihoods) Figure 5.3 Using mind-maps to show metaphorical themes in text

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common domains of meaning or across networks of the same. Students are often taught lexis through meronymy. This can be done unconsciously as when a discussion about furniture will chain the different items together or consciously through diagrams that situate the different items together in the cross-sectional drawing of a house and label them. Words are thus held together by their semantic field. The meronymic structure can be loosened out into sets of looser schematic associations that may correspond better to the student’s own semantic networks. Thus, students can list the words that they associate with a given item. They can then try to post-rationalise these spontaneous associations by drawing a mind-map that shows them as a network of approximate and more distant semantic relationships, perhaps radiating out from the first item that is situated at the centre. Boers (2000) has shown how useful this type of conceptual grouping can be when students gather terms around the metaphor through which they have been conceptualised. Accordingly, a teacher who gathers words generated out of the ‘knowledge-is-sight’ metaphor – see into/insight, perspective, view, see, perceive/perception, clarify and so on – may obtain better retention than one who simply picks them up, item by item, from the texts in which they may occur. Equally, students themselves can identify conceptual metaphors as part of their learning strategies and begin to build networks to which they add items as they come across them. For example, we can take the metaphor referred to above that ‘good arguments have weight/strength or substance’ and develop a metaphorical chain where students explore the entailments of a metaphor in a way that does not just help them to group lexis but also engages them in the critical appraisal of their own writing. The teacher might ask students what heavy objects do when thrown towards lighter objects: Student: ‘They crash them.’ (gestures with their hand to show objects swept aside) Teacher: ‘They knock them over. Strong arguments – ’ (hesitates then writes on the board) ‘Arguments that carry the weight of evidence, substantial arguments push aside lightweight ones.’ The teacher may then draw a skittle metaphor where solid arguments bowl over lightweight ones. Moving aside from the issue of linguistic development to the teaching of textual organisation, teachers may show how we plan essay argument structures by setting up the weaker

134 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching Arguments need substance Arguments need weight. Arguments need substance. Lightweight or substanceless arguments have no effect They have no force We have to substantiate the argument with evidence and give it weight or gravity. The force and power of the argument will then carry all before it Figure 5.4 Argument structure metaphors: setting ’em up to knock ’em down

arguments that we disagree with, then dismissing them in subsequent paragraphs. The vertical argument structure where an opposing argument is set out in full, paragraph by paragraph, and dismissed in full, can be given as bowling over a full set. In this way the teacher does more that use a conceptual metaphor to organise the lexis that derives from it. The teacher creates a chain of images that gives coherence to disparate learning experiences (see Figure 5.4). The metaphorical network can carry students beyond the achievement of an effective system of lexical grouping; they construct a platform that can help the student appraise the ideas with which their subject has to deal. Understanding ‘liquid is a licence for movement’ can become a means to consider the role of money in society. Just as a message is liquid moving through the conduit of communication so cash as liquid is a constant passing of messages with a fixed value of exchange. The message was printed onto English banknotes as a ‘promise to pay the bearer’ the value of the note. From this we can see money as a system of exchange or of the transfer of energy and labour in society. The treatment of money as a solid, or as gold, posits a frozen or lifeless economy, where a focus is not on the creation of capital flows but of frozen and useless hoards. The shared conceptualisation of a metaphor network is not some similarity judgement, which is fossilised in language. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) are keen to stress, such schemas remain active in how we conceptualise the world. Therefore, bringing students into a schema that builds language provides them with both a mechanism of meaning formation and a mnemonic that works because it is central to the nature of

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what is being learnt. The exploitation of this synergy is central to my larger argument about using a sense of metaphor and cognition to heal the analytic rift between how we see language and how we see languagelearning processes. Lindstromberg (1991) and Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) suggested that conceptual metaphors offer students of specialist discourse a way to mark out and group the lexis that expresses a given subject area. For example, we saw the somewhat sparse use of the ‘trade is a lubricant’ metaphor in the text above. Relatedly, finance and business perceive ‘cash’ as ‘a liquid’, leading to ‘liquefy assets’, or ‘cash flow’. In conjunction with a related conceptualisation, ‘organisations and products are ships’, we might obtain ‘market flotation’ or ‘product launch’ because these ‘float’ on finance. Certainly, the use of conceptual metaphors to group lexis and idiom represents a learning process that accords with the mechanisms from which those lexical meanings have emerged. Yet one should be wary of any assertion that a given conceptual metaphor can be exclusively linked to a given subject area. Conceptual metaphors are not a mechanism through which we can mark out a specialist register, rather they are a resource that a discipline can exploit in order to conceptualise the ideas with which it must deal. We see this is how the image schema of a ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’ is not just about cash, it provides a broader understanding of ‘fluids as unstable’. We can see this in Reddy’s (1993) early communication-is-a-conduit metaphor, for ‘conduits’ facilitate the movement of fluids. Equally, fluidity supposes a loss of control or a ‘running away’ as when ‘a hardened’ or ‘frigid personality’ will ‘melt’ into an emotional ‘outpouring’. For the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioner, the conceptual metaphor suggests a schema which, while reaching far beyond their specialisation, can tease out the broader themes within it. Conceptual metaphors also suggest a metadiscoursal schema that can help students chain discourse into a coherent whole. Teachers will find these metadiscoursal schemas powerful because they are not only lexically productive, they also bring a greater coherence to the text itself. Using the metaphor, ‘knowledge is sight’ with the entailment ‘the text is the object seen’ and ‘the author is a guide to the text’, I have elicited appropriate metaphor chains before applying them to the text itself. To one class I first explained that a writer not only had to produce text, they also had to guide the reader through what they produced. I then declared that ‘a guide’ invites others to see. The writer shows off their text and the reader follows them looking at it. This metaphor of the writer’s movement through their text becomes the metaphor that

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makes it cohere as a sequential progression. Wanting to develop the knowledge-is-sight metaphor, I brainstormed for lexis that was built around the theme ‘seeing’ is ‘understanding’. Such terms as ‘view’ or ‘perceive’ were produced and the ‘sight’ part of the list below was quite rapidly built up with my help, then organised according to parts of speech. I shifted the theme from the idea of ‘sight’, ‘view’ and ‘point of view’ to that of what one sees by. I explained how to see one needs light. When something is ‘brought to light’ it can be seen. We bring to light hidden facts and ideas. We ‘reveal’ or ‘shed light on them’ and make them understood. With the help of the class, I then added such words as ‘elucidate’, ‘appear’ and ‘show’ to the list and discussed their meaning. It became clear that the lexis might be developed further around another entailment, ‘things known are objects seen’, and thus away from how we discover objects towards how we look at them. This meant moving away from verbs that were simply based on a metaphorical representation of understanding as sight (for example, see or survey) and towards the act of visualising the structure that was being represented (for example, gain an insight into a flawed structure). Accordingly, I began to plot this movement with a drawing of a metatextual narrative where the writer guides the reader through their text. It explores a text from the perspective of a guide who shifts vantage-points and even animal forms, as from bird to human.

Survey the area Look at several points of view Focus on one of them

Examine it from different perspectives

gain an insight

into its flawed structure

perspectives

Figure 5.5 Writing metatext with the metaphors: ‘knowledge is sight’ and ‘the author is a guide to their own text’

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I then set up the narrative of a guide to the topography as shown in Figure 5.5. The idea of a birds-eye view was sketched to show the wide perspective with a lack of detail that is obtained by the ‘surveying’ of a scene. I contrasted this by talking of ‘zooming in’ first by ‘looking at’ different ‘points of view’, then by ‘focusing’ upon one of them. Next we considered how objects (the house in this case) appear differently from different perspectives. In order to get to know a building we have to walk round it and view it from different perspectives. I went on to describe how to obtain a deeper understanding we have to see into the topic and obtain an ‘insight’ into features that are not immediately visible such as a flawed structure. The room had two boards and I then moved to the second one to show darkness, as inside the house, and how we had to bring objects into the light and ‘reveal’ or elucidate their nature by drawing a sun above it. Finally, I asked students to act as guides to their own writing. I said they should follow the sequence in the drawings on the board and say how they would show the reader round. Thus, they would first ‘survey the area and look at the different points of view’. Using this schema, the class produced very accurate oral texts. However, the texts were somewhat vacuous because the metatext was not acting as a guide to a genuine topic. With hindsight, it would have been more interesting to structure and embed a genuine essay topic into the unfolding sequence of visual imagery. A less conventional approach might be to give metatextual metaphor more concrete form. One could put the essay points that are noted in a plan onto different large pieces of paper that mark stages in a student’s walk around the class. The student will tell classmates about the stages as they come to them, giving a conducted tour of the text that has yet to be. Metaphor is also an issue in the construction of discourse, with conceptual metaphor as a means to ensure the thematic binding of text. For example, the following sentences cohere through the conceptual metaphor of ‘communication is a conduit’ (Reddy, 1993) and the entailment that ‘barriers are impediments to communication’. The ‘barrier’ schema is used to extend a reworking of Churchill’s iron-curtain metaphor and has probably been evoked in the author’s mind by the same: 58 Yuri Maslyukov, the former Communist MP in charge of Russia’s stricken economy, fears a new Iron Curtain is about to descend across Europe. This time, it is Washington, not Moscow, that will erect the barrier, and it will be a financial ring-fence rather than barbed wire

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that separates Russia from the rest of the world. (Financial Times, 1997, my emphasis) Making students aware of how they might develop textual cohesion out of conceptual metaphor in this way will perhaps be best achieved by looking at texts as chains of metaphors that have emerged from a common conceptual core. Again this encourages students to build up Boers’ (2000) patterns of conceptually related lexis, both helping them to remember it better and furnishing them with the metaphorical themes that can create cohesion in their own writing.

Expressing deductive and inductive arguments When I show students the metaphorical roots of a given form of expression this can help to clarify the nature of that meaning. This is not just the case I discussed, where the idea of a ‘substantial’ argument is made clear by looking at the root meaning of substance. When students are using the target language as a medium of education, they are not just translating new meanings but acquiring new concepts within it. For example, I have often found that my students’ inability to express deductive argument in English is matched by a failure to understand the nature of a logical relationship in any language. Logic, above all, presupposes causation. Causation makes events occur, or links one action to another. Causation must also be bound up with a human sense of ourselves as responsible agents able to precipitate actions. It is as if we are vesting a process, causation, not simply with the capabilities of an object but with those of a human agent as well. In philosophy, causation has always been problematic and, in a now familiar act of reification, Aristotle had to conceive of it as an entity within the world (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This conception may amount to an unconscious exposition of the ‘nature as agent’ metaphor which Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 212) see as essential to the linguistic structuration of causal relationships. Lakoff and Johnson have identified many metaphors as essential to the expression of causation. Of particular importance is ‘the path’ or what can be elaborated as ‘the location, event-structure metaphor’ and its conceptualisation of states and states of being as locations, and actions as ‘selfpropelled motions’. The causal path metaphor can be analysed as follows: Self-propelled motion Traveller Locations

→ → →

Action Actor States

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A lone path Being on the path Leading to The end of the path

→ → → →

A natural course of action Natural causation Results in Resulting final state

(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 210) An additional causal metaphor is ‘changing is turning’, as in turning ‘lead into gold’ (ibid.: 211) where we have to conceive of ‘lead’, the resultant state, as a load borne in a different direction. Thus, in a sentence such as 59, below, we should first understand that we treat paths as human guides that lead us to places and we treat logical connections as physical ones. Here we have the conceptualisation that ‘logic is a path’ and ‘paths are guides’ with the resulting entailment that ‘logic is a guide’: 59 Deforestation leads to a higher run-off of rain-water and brings about erosion, putting us on course towards poor harvest and recurrent flooding. which could be analysed as follows: 60 Deforestation is a path. The path of deforestation is a guide that leads to a location. The result of deforestation, or the higher run-off of water is the place where the path leads. The higher run-off turns or brings itself about, and in turning comes towards another location or result. A poor harvest and recurrent floods are that location. All of these metaphors of causation assume sets of spatial relations that are expressed through prepositions: to towards about/around on in over from

→ → → → → → →

a state/location remediable state turning/change of direction on the path the end state as a container or compound an impediment to movement on the path a location as an initial state

Equally, we can perceive how phrasal verbs employ particles in a way that can be explained through the above schema: ●

Comes from. This is a complex and very interesting case. Cause is also expressed by a metaphor of progeneration (Lakoff and

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● ● ●

Johnson, 1999: 209). Yet in this case progeneration is expressing itself through the path metaphor. We therefore perceive an image schematic hierarchy where progeneration is itself a causal relationship that employs the path metaphor (‘comes from’ as in ‘where do babies come from?’) to express itself then lends this back as a path-type expression of causation affected by the idea of progeneration as in x comes from y. Results in/from. Leads to. Brings about. Perhaps a nautical metaphor in ‘bring the ship about’, hence causation as a change of direction as if to facilitate a link. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, also see ‘turning’ as a metaphor of causation)

There are many collocations that express the path schema. For example: ● ● ● ●

●

Conclude from Evolves from/out of Derives from/out of Deduced from/out of (derive and deduce are both in origin latin expressions of movement or ‘leading’ away from ‘de’) Draw from

These last involve a different repositioning of the speaker in respect of what they describe. We can of course see events or objects depart from a place where we are not situated, just as we can imagine them ‘leading to’ a place where we have never been. However, the common though not universal evolution of prepositions from body parts (Heine, 1997) suggests that we are primarily predisposed towards an egocentric need to view ourselves as a centre towards which or from which events and objects will travel. Equally, the above phrases show once again how metaphorical hierarchies are at work. The existence of the container metaphor is clear from the ease with which ‘out of’ can be substituted for ‘from’ with ‘evolve’ and ‘deduce’, as with the admittedly more marginal case of ‘derive’. ‘Deduction’ itself supposes a ‘leading out of’, where the ideas must be contained within the premises from which they are led out. Interestingly also, ‘deduction’, as the word’s etymology implies (lead from), suggests the existence of a human agent. This action ‘leading one point out of another’ can be initiated by a human subject. We therefore engage in bringing the connection into existence as opposed to conceiving of ourselves simply as the witnesses of events travelling down their particular paths.

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Causation is also schematised through ‘upward’ or ‘downward’ movement as in ‘a problem has arisen in Bosnia’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 213). Probably this is part of the larger ‘unconscious ideas are down or buried’ schema; the problem is not perceived until it rises from the ground. Relatedly, one has the notion of ‘cause’ working upwards against gravity in the ‘ideas are buildings’ metaphor (Cobuild Dictionary of Metaphor). Downward motion is perhaps schematically more remote and can be found in the etymology of the verb ‘depend’ or ‘hang from’ and the idiomatic ‘hangs on’ as in ‘it all hangs on whether we can get there in time or not’. Some of the schematic structures of metaphor, such as the event structure metaphor (time is space) may be common to how humans everywhere organise cognition. They are accessible and universal principles underlying the representation of meaning in language. The derived principle for teachers is that their exploitation of such schemas may make the construction of meaning in language appear more systematic and less strange. Yet, we should remember that it would be quite wrong to suggest that all schemas are common across languages. Even those that are common can produce quite different conceptual metaphors. In this vein, I have often found that the English ‘depend on’ baffles Romance language speakers. A Romance speaker’s bewilderment is perhaps not simply because they are matching cognates: (for example, dépendre de: depends from) but because ‘de’ (from) is schematically more consistent with hanging and supposes the downward direction of one object from another. To complicate the matter further, Romance languages do not distinguish between the directional ‘from’ and the ‘possessive’ of, perhaps because they have structured possession out of schema of spatial attachment. Therefore, dependency suggests the attachment of one thing to another. One student asked me why English said ‘depend on’ when ‘everybody’ said ‘depend of’ with the same indignation that European students sometimes use when they ask why the English drive on the left. The indignation was humorous but I took it seriously. I first said that Spanish did not say ‘depends of’ but ‘depends from’. The student challenged this and asked me how I knew it. I asked her what ‘pender’ meant in Spanish. She was an advanced student but temporarily lost the English word. A colleague helped out with ‘(h)ang’. I turned to the class and asked if their clothes ‘hung of or from a hook’. I motioned downwards to show hanging as an action and thus gave the answer away. I repeated in a somewhat laboured manner ‘hang from, hang from’.

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I first explained, by curling my finger into a hook and resting another on it, that in English we can think of one thing hanging ‘on’ another. I showed how one of my fingers hooked onto another finger, and improvised this text: 61 Trees depend on rain. Rain depends on trees. Rivers depend on trees and rain. I then drew trees, rain and rivers as hanging one from each other and got the class to build similar sentences with ‘depend on’ by pointing to them. Next I pointed to the ‘hooks’ from which ‘the tree’ and ‘the rain’ were suspended and showed through gesture how hanging can be seen either as interrupted motion from or as pressure on a point or hook. I said how in English it was pressure on. It may be the case that the original meaning of ‘depend’ was lost when it came into English. Because English more commonly expresses cause through ‘upward movement’ or ‘building’, as in ‘based on the premise’, ‘depend’ became ‘depend on’ according to the model of ‘based on’, ‘founded on’ or ‘built on’. But, pedagogically, the point was made, even if it was through an inaccurate construction of the metaphor, and I did not hear the student repeat the error. Interestingly, she did correct a French speaker who came later into the class and made exactly the same mistake. The language of causation deals with our conceptualisation and organisation of reality itself. Such a rich area should demand far more extensive theoretical treatment. Yet it is important also to broach the classroom applications of this work, since it can inform students about how English uses spatial metaphor through its prepositional structure.

Cause-and-effect paths My earlier attempts to deal with the language of causation have had a more traditional focus in that I have introduced topics that have evoked the relevant language. They can involve ‘chain’ or ‘consequence’ activities where one student offers a hypothesis or state of affairs and others suggest what will follow from it. For example, one says ‘the world is flat’, a second that ‘therefore men will fall off into space’ and a third that ‘travel is very dangerous’. The ‘chain’ type activities are themselves a type of metametaphor for the connected sequences they are trying to practice. However, teachers

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can give the sequence of ‘links’ a more concrete form; one which clearly supports the language they are trying to teach. One method is to use a cause-and-effect chain by working with a short text that had a hidden path metaphor built into it. The path stands for the variety of metaphors that express a logical relationship through the physical connection of ‘a cause’ to ‘an effect’. In this case the path is a river. The river connects events topologically from the ‘upstream’ to the ‘downstream’. The path or river, therefore operates on four levels: 1 As a physical entity that exemplifies the consequences of soil erosion. 2 As a context that exemplifies the language of cause and effect, or as a teaching ‘situation’ in other words. 3 As a classroom activity or chained practice where one student carries on the narrative from another, taking it downstream, as it were, event by event. 4 As a metaphor of logical connection. One approach is with the following text: 62 Deforestation results in soil erosion. Soil erosion leads to a higher run-off of water. The high run-off means that water levels rise in the river. Higher water levels can cause flooding and destruction. One can write each event separately on the board, drawing a circle round it: ‘deforestation’, ‘soil erosion’, ‘high run-off’, and so forth. Then one can draw lines linking one event to another, thus creating a causal path, or river sweeping one cause into its effect. As one draws the lines one can supply the linking verbs: ‘results in’, ‘leads to’, ‘means that’, ‘can cause’. Next one can rub out the events but leave the blank circles and the lines connecting them. Students can then insert other events into the chain ‘Yusef slept a long time’, ‘Yusef late today’, which provides good practice in nominalisation as the events are transformed into noun phrases that can affect each other: ‘Yusef’s sleeping a long time’ led to ‘Yusef being late today’. The chain metaphor and the chain activity both reinforce the lexis of physical connection that underpins the expression of cause and effect. Dependency, as a form of cause-and-effect relationship, reflects a structure where a brick depends ‘on’ the one beneath it when the etymology of ‘depend’ supposes a reverse direction of one thing ‘hanging on’ another. Both of these schemas do have the common theme of a construction against gravity, or of one element needing another if it is

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not to fall down. This is also an ‘ideas-are-buildings’ metaphor which is implicit in the word ‘construction’ itself or in other such terms as ‘based on’ or ‘founded in’. When asked to clarify the difference between an ‘empirical’ and a ‘theoretical’ argument, I once did this by showing a diagram of blocks piled onto each other and explaining that the constituents (blocks) of theories tended to rise in a structure where one supported another. I then drew a circle to represent the world, and added an arrow coming out of the world to show how empirical arguments drew their substance from real world events. Another time I conflated the two motifs but showed the world supporting rather than lending substance to an empirical point. I also thought about how to relate this distinction to the type of language through which arguments are expressed, and attempted to combine these two diagrams into a series that would help students develop more powerful argument structures. I tried this procedure with the same class that had done the previous activity. I started by showing the diagram, Figure 5.6, using on overhead transparency projector. I first explained the meaning of aquatic and inadvertently revealed the nature of the argument by using the phrase ‘live in water’. I pointed to ‘Wanda is a fish’ then to the other statements in the diagram. I explained that we knew that some of these statements were true because we would deduce them from the first statement.

Logic is a structure

Wand a

loves wa

ter

Therefore

Wanda lives in water Wanda is aquatic

Thus/ so All fish are aquatic

Wanda is a fish

Figure 5.6 Explaining empirical thought: some statements need support from the world and some support each other

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One of the class asked me the meaning of ‘deduce’. I wrote a very simple equation on the board, apologised for the simple task and asked: if y equals 1, what does x equal when x ⫹ y ⫽ 2? The correct answer was offered with a display of contempt for the question’s elementary nature. I asked him how they knew that x⫽ 1. One of them started to explain how to solve equations, but I cut him short and said he was telling me how to work something out, not why something was true. I then pointed to the floor and asked what colour the carpet was. When he said ‘brown’, I asked him how he knew. He replied as if I was slightly foolish and pointed to his eyes and said ‘I can see’. I asked if he also knew x equalled 1 because he could see it. Another student interpreted ‘see’ metaphorically and annoyingly said yes. I pressed for a literal interpretation of ‘see’, tapped the board impatiently, and asked: ‘Where, where can you see it?’ I wanted them to reply that they could see the solution inside the equation. However, they became confused. I therefore drew a box and said this was the equation, writing the equation again with the number 1 under y. I said we knew that x was 1, not because it was there but because it was hidden inside the ‘box’ of the equation. It was there but hidden and we had to draw it out or ‘draw that conclusion’, and finally I used the word ‘deduce’. I explained how this was different from knowing that the carpet was ‘brown’. I said that when one idea was hidden inside another like the solution to an equation, you had to lead it out or deduce it. I then asked the class to work in pairs and to say which items in the diagram were inside the first statement like the solution to the equation, and which were like the colour of the carpet, found in the world. I paired the student who had asked about the meaning of ‘deduce’ with a stronger one who had clearly understood. When I put this question to the class, the rest of them agreed that ‘Wanda loves water’ could not be deduced from ‘Wanda is a fish’. Their certainty was surprising and may have related to the nature of the diagram. One pair said that they were unsure about ‘Wanda is aquatic’ but another said ‘all fish are aquatic’. Another student objected that the statement ‘all fish are aquatic’ was not on the one that preceded it. Clearly the metaphor was having some effect. Perhaps unwisely, because we were on the edge of an interesting discussion, I decided to move the lesson on towards the logic out of which this diagram was constructed. I did not say whether I agreed or disagreed with their analysis but showed them a second transparency (Figure 5.7).

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Wanda loves water Therefore

Wanda lives in water Wanda is aquatic

Thus/ so All fish are aquatic

Wanda is a fish

s u p p o r t

There is also evidence to show/that supports the fact that

Figure 5.7 Explaining theoretical and empirical thought: self-supporting statements vs statements that seek support in the world

I pointed to the world and said that everything we knew began there. I said we knew that ‘Wanda was a fish’ because we could see the animal of that name. I ended the previous debate by saying that we could observe that all fish were aquatic. I then emphasised: 1 Thus, we know that Wanda is aquatic. 2 Therefore we can say that Wanda is aquatic. 3 So we can state that Wanda is aquatic. I next asked what aquatic meant. When a student answered correctly, I wrote on the board: ‘Wanda lives in water’ and put a blank in front of it, and asked the class to complete the sentence in the same way as sentences 1, 2 and 3 above. In the next stage I pointed to ‘Wanda loves water’ and asked if we knew that ‘because Wanda was a fish and all fish were aquatic’. One student said ‘yes, because fish love water’. I took the second transparency off the overhead projector and pointed again to the first with its illustration of ‘Wanda loves water’ tipping off the structure. I said that this was not supported by the ideas under it. I said more emphatically that we could only say ‘Wanda loves water’ if we learnt it from an examination of Wanda’s feelings and behaviour. I said that the world must ‘support’ this statement.

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I tried this activity with a class who had not previously given much time or thought to the construction of academic argument and the differences between a theoretical and an empirical approach. However, the visual construction of the metaphorical basis of this argument brought them to use the language and its conceptualisation with little difficulty. Linking adjuncts that express causality such as ‘therefore’ and ‘thus’ are constantly misused by students. They are sometimes almost deliberately misused by more experienced writers in order to give an argument the authority of a logical structure that it does not properly possess. When I talked to the students in a subsequent lesson they stated that they had never really understood the meaning of these words before.

Conclusion Metaphorical extension develops language away from the bedrock of common responses to the experience in which its meanings may first take root. It exposes how meanings lie hidden in the gathered layers of obscure sociocultural contexts or vanished speech situations. Fillmore et al. (1988) define decoding idioms as ‘conventional’ ways to express a meaning in language. They can be neither used nor understood without a knowledge of the conventions that govern their meaning (Croft and Cruse, forthcoming). Yet embedding these idioms in their metaphors of origin can make them more memorable and could constitute a state of learning where a student’s linguistic ontogenesis mimics the language’s phylogenesis. In other words, the individual’s linguistic development mimics that of the language, achieving a given meaning then extending that out into idiom through the metaphors that the meaning suggests. Therefore the teacher activates a student’s awareness of their ‘path’ imageschema by explaining the origins of the idiom, reattaching it to the organisational or schematic principle by which the item was first produced. In the case of a conventional idiom such as ‘a red herring’, one can illustrate to students how a ‘path’ schema (Lakoff, 1987) is allowing us to conceive of a conversation as following a particular direction or course. The path ‘schema’ may explain the intuition that in most languages ‘direction’ has both a physical and an abstract sense. Thus, the phrase ‘a conversational change of direction’ will be comprehensible to those who first encountered the word in the context of moving from ‘left to right’. In other words, we begin by making students aware of how they also conceive of changes of direction as changes of topic, and help them to develop the language through which this is expressed in English.

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Hunting, sailing, gardening and walking in crowded cities Draw him off the scent Change of direction

Changing place is changing topic

A red herring A change of tack

Look at it from another direction/ perspective/in another way Approach it/look at it from another angle Turn to another subject/move on Lead him off in the wrong direction

Lead him down a blind alley/up the garden path/on a wild goose chase

Figure 5.8 Metaphor and idiom: the effect of culture on a universal schema

In Figure 5.8, students are shown how a conceptualisation that will be familiar from their own languages, ‘changing place is changing topic’, will yield idiomatic phrases which may have an obvious equivalence in their own language. A third level is then illustrated where certain features of English culture start to skew the way in which the core schema is realised. For example, the idiom, ‘a red herring’, evolved from the use of rotten fish to give bloodhounds a false scent (Goatly, 1997), implying an unpredictable cultural individuation or historical coincidence of thought and event. It is further a derivation of which most native speakers are unaware. In the idiom, ‘a change of tack’, one can detect the influence of Britain’s maritime tradition on its language, while a ‘wild goose chase’ again reflects hunting. ‘The garden path’, reflects the maize-like organisation of some gardens, while ‘blind alley’ expresses the unplanned nature of England’s cities with their cul-de-sacs and narrow twisting streets. ‘Drawn off the scent’ and ‘change of tack’ are in a compromise position. The first is a hunting metaphor and as such shows clearly how culture affects this type of construction. At the same time it makes the use of that metaphor explicit and could be understood without recourse to the linguistic conventions by which its meaning is underpinned. The meaning of ‘change of tack’ may be disguised more by the obscure use of nautical lexis than by a hidden metaphor.

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Whilst acknowledging that they cannot equip students with the type of analytical skills that will trace back the schematic roots of an idiom such as ‘a red herring’, teachers might give more thought to using the target language to teach students about its origins and its nature. Further, the metaphor of the hunt and the foul scent of rotten fish may well become a mnemonic to fix the idiom more securely. Again, this is an example of how teachers can anchor language in the cognition from which it has been developed while paying less heed to an ephemeral and artificially induced context of use. A language is littered with such lost similarity judgements, and stands as a record of past cultural practice. Knowledge of the schemas from which a given expression has evolved may help students to understand how the category construction of languages differs. It may help students find the conceptualisations that are common across languages and those that are not. By putting metaphor onto the pedagogical agenda, I am not suggesting it as a way to deduce the universal principles of meaning construction. I am suggesting, however, that it does make a second language less strange by making its meanings appear more principled. To come upon a foreign language as a synchronic construct is like being stranded in the world with a consciousness that is simply reactive and devoid of all powers of explanation or analysis. An awareness of metaphor can explain how that unfamiliar world of meaning has come to be. Understanding the conceptual core of a language will put learners at play inside the network of schematisations from which the meanings of language have been formed.

6 Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar

Traditional linguistic analysis divides languages into three components, ‘the grammatical/syntactic’, ‘the semantic’ and the ‘phonological’. A very simple example of how this distinction operates can be observed in the sentence ‘John opened the book’. A syntactic pattern, which can be broadly characterised as SVO (subject, verb, object) sets up slots which are filled by words of different kinds, a specified male person ‘John’, an action ‘opened’ and the goal of his attentions ‘the book’, for example. The pattern combines the meaningful items and is then articulated as sound, entailing a phonological and finally a phonetic component. Linguists have seen idiom as a challenge to this basic distinction (Fillmore et al., 1988, cited in Croft and Cruse, forthcoming). The severest challenge comes from a type of idiom that can be characterised as formal or as having a pattern which can be completed by different items of lexis. An example of this can be given as follows: 63

The more you practise, the easier it will get. The louder you shout, the sooner they will serve you. The bigger the nail is, the more likely the board is to split. (Croft and Cruse, forthcoming)

According to the traditional type of linguistic analysis that we have just considered, a given structure such as the one above can only be specified according to syntactic categories. Thus, a transitive sentence would be broadly described as NP VP (noun phrase followed by verb phrase). The problem with idioms of the type shown in 63 is that they are syntactic structures that have parts, which are lexically specified. In short, they are syntactic structures which only allow a particular category of lexis. The type of meaning which we want to communicate is affecting the way in which the structure develops. 150

Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 151

Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 488–92) give another example of how syntax and meaning interact. Generative grammar puts forward the most powerful contemporary model of how syntax controls lexis by positioning it according to patterns that set up categories such as VP (verb phrase) or verb. The Generative thesis is that the essence of language resides in a syntax that controls the organisation of a sentence without being affected by the meanings of the words or units in the sentence. Although some allowance is now made for a semantic effect, this remains the core position. One product of the generative position is the co-ordinate structure constraint. According to transformational grammar more complicated structures are built up from simple clauses by what is called movement. A co-ordinate structure is one that combines two clauses as in ‘John ate something and Bill drank something’. If we were to treat one of these clauses as a separate sentence and turn it into the question: ‘what did John eat?’, transformational grammar would tell us that we would do this by changing ‘something’ to ‘what’ and moving it to the beginning of the sentence. We would represent the movement with an underlined blank space to mark where the ‘what’ had been moved from as in 64: 64

What did John eat ______?

However, if we do this when 64 is a clause that is part of a co-ordinate structure, then we will produce an ungrammatical sentence as in 65: 65

What did John eat _____ and Bill drank something?

The fact that this creates an ungrammatical sentence gives transformational grammarians the co-ordinate structure constraint: ‘no constituent can be moved out of a co-ordinate structure unless it is moved out of all conjuncts’ (Ross, 1967, 1985, cited in Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This would make ‘What did John eat and Bill drink?’ grammatical because the constituent is moved out of all conjuncts. Yet there are many exceptions to this constraint. Among those that Lakoff and Johnson (1999) cite are 66 and 67: 66 What did John go to the store and buy ________ ? (Ross, 1967) 67 How much can you drink _____ and still stay sober? (Goldsmith, 1985) Such evidence suggests that there is no co-ordinate structure constraint in the sense of a mechanism that syntax has imposed over lexis and

152 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

meaning. Lakoff’s (1986) solution was to see the cases predicted by the original constraint as involving what he calls semantic parallelism. By semantic parallelism he means cases where the conjuncts dealing with semantic fields can be considered parallel in the sense of dealing with contextually related topics. Thus 68, below, demands the constraint because the semantic fields of ‘food’ and ‘drink’ intertwine through the shared context of sustenance. When there is no possibility of a shared context as in 69, and thus no parallelism, the constraint would result in a meaning that is too bizarre to be acceptable: 68 69

What did John eat ____ and Bill drink? (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) What did John eat ____ and Bill tune? (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)

A consequence is that sentences operate with different levels of constraint as to the lexis that they can select. A multiple conjunct sentence such as 68 will allow movement because it also possesses semantic parallelism. A sentence such as 69 will not because it does not possess this attribute. Idioms such as ‘the longer you wait the worse it will be’, also constrain the items that may be used in a manner that would not be predicted by a formal grammar while also allowing a range of lexical forms. Langacker (1990 and 1994) treats such structures as ‘schematic’; although they can be generalised beyond one set of items, they cannot operate upon all items of a given grammatical category. A related point is made by Langacker’s (1990) concept of construal. A traditional grammatical analysis would treat the following two sentences as having the same meaning: 70 71

John gave the book to Mary. John gave Mary the book. (Lee, 2001: 2)

According to a generative analysis, one might argue that 71 results from movement of the PP (prepositional phrase) in 70. Such ‘movement’ was illustrated in example 70, above. However, as Langacker (1990: 14) has pointed out, such ‘movement’ is not always possible; in 72 and 73 an absurd meaning is created: 72 73

John gave the fence a new coat of paint. John gave a new coat of paint to the fence.

Clearly the possible meaning is being constrained by other factors. In this case there is a schematic constraint operating from the idiom itself.

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An additional point is that 70 and 71 involve ‘two different ways of construing the same situation’ (Lee, 2001: 2). One suspects that ‘gave Mary the book’ operates more as an abstract exchange of possession, allowing the incorporation of this phrase into the paint idiom where ‘give’ no longer has the meaning of putting an object into the receiver’s hands. ‘Give to’ still carries echoes of a physical change of hands. A larger point is that meaning constrains the combinations of words that appear to be made possible by a grammar. A grammar has evolved as an expression of certain meaning relations and as such must respond to the types of meanings it combines. Fillmore et al. (1988) call constructions the schematic idioms that impose a lower level of constraint to syntactic structure (Croft and Cruse, forthcoming). The larger and more significant argument is that the constructions cut across the componential model of language with the vertical structure shown in Figure 6.1. The constructions are like lexical items in that they ‘combine syntactic, semantic and phonological information’ (Croft and Cruse, forthcoming). As Fillmore et al. (1988) already suggested we should perhaps model all language this way. A consequence is that we should not perceive language as syntactic patterns that can be generalised as setting up a slot that can be filled by any item which belongs to an appropriate part of speech. For example, let us take a simple sentence that is NP (noun phrase) VP (verb phrase). Let us further suppose that the VP consists of three other slots, VP (verb phrase), NP (noun phrase) and PP (prepositional phrase). This could give us 74 below, where ‘Tom’ is NP and ‘pulled ropes to get the job’ is VP, with ‘pulled’ being V, ‘ropes’ NP and ‘to get the job’ PP. 74

Tom pulled ropes to get the job. (Croft and Cruse, forthcoming)

constructions

lexicon

Phonological component Linking rules Syntactic component Linking rules Semantic component Figure 6.1 Model of a construction grammar Source: Croft and Cruse, forthcoming.

154 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

The problem is that 74 is wrong. It is wrong because the combination of ‘pulled’ (VP) and ‘to get the job’ (PP) sets up a restriction on what will come between them, only ‘strings’ is admissible, giving 75 as the correct form: 75

Tom pulled strings to get the job.

The suggestion of a construction grammar is that this type of constraint should be treated as central to how we store and schematise language. For the teacher a key point is that grammar cannot be taught as patterns that the student can generalise in a manner that includes any appropriate lexis. Grammar needs to be considered as a process of negotiation between patterns that can be widely generalised, English word order, NP VP, for example, and patterns that are entirely constrained by the specific nature of the meanings they organise. ‘Tom pulled strings’ exemplifies this last case. A further emphasis is placed upon the grammar that controls collocation or the collocation that controls grammar. A collocation represents the statistical likelihood of one term co-occurring with another. Thus we will ‘bake a cake’ for example, but ‘roast meat’ even though both processes involve the same apparatus and might be expressed by the same term in some other languages. Corpus linguists who search for such statistical co-occurrences provide useful evidence for their existence but treat them as constraints which the student must simply learn. Yet many collocations are not unproductive anomalies that must simply be learnt item by item but involve wider schematisations. For example, the melting out of fat and the reduction of the meat is contrasted with the concept of a composite which must be bound together by the cooking process. Thus the Idealised Cognitive Model (ICM) of meat sets up a series of constraints on the verbs that will follow it in certain contexts (roast) or the adjectives that precede it in others (roast meat). Understanding such a constraint involves a wider understanding of how the category ‘meat’ is constructed. Thus we have idioms that set up slots to allow a limited range of lexis with the same grammatical form. Such constructions reveal how there is continuum between the lexical phrase, or chunk which is productive only of itself, at one end and the structure with open grammatical categories at the other end. They suggest that any utterance is finally a product of both very general grammatical constraints and the manner in which these are schematised by the more specific requirements of specific lexical meanings.

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A point that is more specific to metaphor is raised by the example of 75, above (Tom pulled strings to get the job). This originates in a conceptual domain of ‘puppets are manipulated people’. This metaphor produces a family of related expressions: ‘just a puppet on a string’, ‘string-pulling’, ‘a puppet-government’ and so on. If teachers understand how conceptual domains build meanings in this way, they can teach them as a schematic constraint that has a greater scope for generalisation than a one-off collocation. A pedagogical generalisation about advanced students of English is that most of their errors are lexical in nature. Under a definition of construction grammar, I suspect that many of these could be called ‘grammatical’ though perhaps a more appropriate term would be ‘schematic’ because of how they represent a larger failure to grasp the image-schematic or conceptual principles that constrain the organisation of lexis. A contrary point is that some grammar teaching may be overgeneralised in the sense of focusing upon a rule for combinations that exist at a level of abstraction which are altogether outside the components they manipulate. In other words, they assume that we store rules rather than schema built out of prototypical examples which incorporate the types of meaning by which they are fashioned. The fact that we do not store such rules may account for how we find that students largely fail to apply explicit grammatical knowledge to the production of specific meanings.

Phrasal verbs At first sight, a phrasal verb would appear to be a ‘lexical chunk’ or idiom of the highly restricted type. A feature that identifies some phrasal verbs is a specificity of meaning that cannot be predicted from the individual meanings of the verb and the particle or preposition of which it is composed. Thus the meaning of ‘put up’ in ‘put up your friends for a night’, cannot be constructed from a knowledge of the meaning of ‘put’ and ‘up’. As with other opaque or decoding idioms such as ‘kick the bucket’, the meanings of the verb and particle would appear to have extended each other within a particular historical context and has thus given the phrase a meaning which could not be predicted by anyone operating outside that context. A consequence of this is that teachers will often inform students that English phrasal verbs have simply to be learnt as items of lexis. An added difficulty is that the same verb particle combination can have more than one meaning. For example, ‘look up (the information)’, ‘look up (an old

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friend)’ or ‘look up (and see)’. To complicate matters still further, the addition of another preposition or particle will create another meaning still as in, ‘look up to’. Yet although some phrasal verbs are the unpredictable consequence of two extended meanings, others may be made transparent by an understanding of the schematic organisation that underpins the particles of which they are partly composed. For the teacher, a way forward is to draw their students’ attention to the particles and their schematic categories of meaning. A basic need is to understand how prepositions begin in our need to organise space. Prepositions reveal how we organise space around our physical orientation or the orientation of objects within space. Prepositions are themselves often derived from body parts (Heine, 1997) and have thus been constructed out of the different orientations of the body towards the object being described. Vestiges of this schema remain in English where such parts as ‘back’ and ‘head’ are used in prepositions to indicate spatial orientation. Some languages will make the centre outside the body as in the use of words relating to ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’ for ‘up’ (Heine, 1997: 39). Again this schema occurs in English with such derivatives as ‘heavenwards’ or the idiomatic verb ‘sky’ as in ‘he skyed it over the bar’. We often conceptualise abstract meanings through spatial organisation and orientation. A fundamental example is the use of ‘up’ to express happiness, fulfilment or satisfaction. Such meanings underpin those of phrasal verbs, as when we advise somebody that they are ‘getting us down’. Lindner (1981), Hawkins (1984), Boers (1996) and Lindstromberg (1997) have all explored the image schematic basis of these prepositional meanings and their common adverbial use in English phrasal verbs. Many successful language teachers will already intuit the usefulness of the body as a means to centre our understanding of spatial prepositions. For example, the procedure of blindfolding a student and steering them round the class is useful for teaching and practising left/right, forward/ backward orientations. Such exercises reveal an intuited understanding of how we should deal first not in the meaning of a preposition but in the schema of spatial organisation which the prepositions express. But these exercises do not develop an understanding of how English prepositions retain some schematic consistency when their meanings are abstracted further from the simple representation of spatial relations towards an expression of states of being and of mind. In English they are grammaticalised as particles that will profoundly modify verb meaning and cause quite deep confusion for learners. They can also give expression to the spatial metaphors through which logical and causal relationships are expressed.

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Some textbook approaches to phrasal verbs attempt a thematic organisation of phrasal verb meanings and also contrast the different meanings of a verb stem such as ‘get’ when modified by different particles such as ‘on with’ or ‘up’. Such approaches also attempt some organisation of verbs around their particles, contrasting, for example: ‘come up’, ‘go up’, ‘pick up’, and ‘make up’. However, they fail to recognise that the same preposition may modify its verb differently because the preposition is drawing its meaning from a different metaphorical extension of the original meaning, or from a different entailment of the same prototypical meaning. What exactly I mean by this, I will now make clear by looking at ‘up’. A salient feature of the preposition ‘up’ is that its referent is prototypically dynamic (Boers, 1996). A static case such as the ‘pen is up there’ has been studied as occurring in only about 9 per cent of cases (ibid.: 135). The use of ‘up’ as a particle is also often dynamic, though some uses, ‘stand up’ vs ‘standing up’ for example, can employ a different reference with the same verb. It is also important to understand that although ‘up’ is prototypically dynamic, it is often expressive of movement towards an implied, static end-point (Lindner, 1981). Thus, when we say ‘lift it up’ or ‘open it up’ we are assuming movement towards a final end position. This is an important aid to understanding the fuller, metaphorical use of the particle in English, because ‘up’ thereby extends its meaning to a referent or schema that is not so much physically dynamic as indicative of something complete. Thus, one shifts from ‘lift up’ through ‘fill up’ to ‘clean up’ and finds that in the last case any sense of a vertical dynamic has been almost entirely lost. The above meaning shift is something that teachers can use to rationalise the use of verb particles. As in many of the procedures outlined here, our explanational departure point is to help students grasp abstract meaning through its physical metaphor. Thus, we show how ‘up’ refers to spatial movement in a verb such as ‘go up’. We then show how this spatial movement is abstracted towards an idea of completion as in ‘fill up’. Both of the usages, ‘go up’ and ‘fill up’ imply the dynamic of a rising level but the latter extends it towards the idea of a point that is completed or attained. This explains how in a phrasal verb such as ‘clean up’, the particle ‘up’ now has the meaning of an action that is complete. When teaching phrasal verbs with these schemas, I have brainstormed for verbs that used ‘up’ to express upward motion, or ‘up’ as a physical dynamic. For example, I drew a circle on the board and put an arrow inside and wrote ‘up’ next to it. Students suggested quite obvious

158 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

examples such as ‘go up’ and ‘climb up’. Another quipped ‘shut up’ and this stimulated some metaphorical uses such as ‘fed up’ to which I responded by asking if they were ‘fed up’ because their teachers had ‘fed’ them too much English. The student shrugged, smiled apologetically, then said that it was just an example. I ignored ‘fed up’ by only writing verbs of upward movement around the arrow in a circle. ‘Fed up’ uses ‘up’ as an end point. To introduce the next phase, I explained that ‘up’ was not just upward movement, it was also being ‘up’. I pointed to a poster on the wall and said that it was ‘up’ on the wall. I drew another circle with a dot inside it and a horizontal arrow pointing at it. I asked for other examples of verbs that use this ‘up’. A student suggested ‘put up’ (in the sense of put up a picture) and it was clear that they had not understood the distinction. I therefore squatted down then rose slowly saying ‘I am rising up’ and now I am … ’ in order to elicit standing ‘up’. I then wrote ‘standing’ next to the second circle on the board. Examples were still slow in coming so I suggested the word ‘picture’ and had to insert the word ‘hang’. Another student suggested the word ‘is’, reverting to the first example and I wrote it on the board. In order to move the class on to some more difficult meanings, I explained that ‘up’ can mean increase as in ‘pile up’. The group did not know ‘pile’ so I gestured with the palm of the hand to show something piling up on the floor then pointed to a ‘pile’ of papers left by another teacher in the corner of the class. I then asked if it was ‘hot’ today and the response was an unequivocal ‘no’: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Students:

‘But warmer than yesterday? ’ ‘OK a little.’ ‘So the temperature is going … ’ ‘Up.’

I moved on towards the meaning of ‘up’ as completion, first as it expresses an end to the increase in the quantity of something, as in ‘fill up’, then with an example ‘split up’ where the metaphorical origin of the term was less clear. I had intended to cover many examples of each category. A procedure that introduced so many similar forms at the same time was almost bound to result in ‘lexical overload’ and cause confusion. I therefore modified my plan in class to include a few examples of each schema, which the class then tried to blend into a single chain story. I did not teach the last and perhaps the most interesting sense of ‘up’ in ‘bringing

Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 159

up buried thoughts’ and, antinomically, ‘unconscious knowledge is beneath’. The beginning of the story was predictable: Student 1:

‘I got up in the morning.’

Then it unfolded as a sequence of poorly connected sentences, as is often the way with chain stories: Student 2: ‘I hang up a picture.’ Teacher: ‘Hang …?’ Student 2: ‘Hanged.’ Teacher: ‘Hung.’ The class did show an ability to discriminate between some of the different uses of the particle. However, the initial ‘up’, representing dynamic upward movement tended to dominate, a feature that was perhaps reinforced by the unexpectedly low level of the class and their interest in staying in the security of a language constructed out of a more salient set of physical referents. My first attempt to use this technique meant that my interest in it overrode the need to provide thematic variety and avoid too large a lexical load. My suggestion now is that teachers who are introducing these verbs should be wary of dedicating an hour and a half to them and should instead allot each schema a separate spot in a class dedicated to another topic. One schema could be revised before teachers continue to the next. In addition, as with any issue of metaphor and perhaps of meaning, it would be mistaken to view a given schema as a clear-cut organisational category without overlap or sets of subcategories with equally fuzzy boundaries. The first approach was implemented with lists of phrasal verbs organised according to what appeared to be a salient schematic principle. This draws on the linguistic need to organise language according to clear categories. In this I was influenced by Lindner’s (1981) provision of clear and distinct sets of referents for the particle ‘up’, such as the abstract end point of ‘clean up’, and the physical dynamic ‘shoot up’ that was just mentioned. However, one of the difficulties of dealing with schematic categories out of which metaphors build meaning is that these are themselves metaphorical. As I have discussed, metaphorical meanings are by their nature extensible, and evolve from a blurring of the category boundaries that our schematic principles are trying to re-institute. The extended ‘up is an end point’ meaning clearly evolves

160 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

from the spatial referent or implied end-point shown in ‘lift up’, then in ‘fill up’. The spatial ‘end-point’ is then extended by the ‘time is space’ image schema towards one that is temporal as in ‘time’s up’. The particle thus becomes a kind of intensifier to underscore the proper completion of an action as in ‘clean up’. My point is not that language learners require this kind of detailed metalinguistic knowledge about how each phrasal verb is schematically constructed. I am not setting out rules here, so much as helping students to construct a fluid sense of different types of conceptualisation that achieve a given linguistic expression. These conceptualisations express the use of the particle that is appropriate to them. They suggest a schema that can group the phrasal verbs that have emerged from it. I want to help students to find in themselves the schemas that were responsible for these creations in the first place and which will therefore promote their effective cognitive organisation and storage. In order to focus more clearly on my objective and provide students with a surer sense of the different extensions of ‘up’ as a particle, I constructed the six worksheets shown in Figures 6.2–6.7. The worksheets show how these verbs were organised. Contrary to my previous conclusion I used them together as a set, building a class in much the same way described above. However, this group already had some knowledge of Up is dynamic

Come Sit Get Stand Fold Walk Climb Put Set Leap Jump

Organisation

The rocket goes up

Figure 6.2 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schema represented by the particle ‘up is dynamic’

Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 161

these verbs; the idea that the verbs had some organisational principle incited considerable interest and their story showed a wider scope and a stronger sense of narrative. Most interestingly, in subsequent discussions they started to extend the analytical principle of metaphor to other aspects of language, commenting on such ideas as ‘deep sleep’ when we touched on the idea of depth and unconsciousness, or raising other associated fragments of knowledge such as ‘dig up’ an idea. The worksheets should not in any sense be regarded as my final word about the teaching of phrasal verbs. Rather, they should be treated as a point of departure or as a statement for further development. In order to hasten that process, I now set out their rationale. The first sheet (Figure 6.2) lists a set of verbs with some sketches of some of their possible contextual referents. Two arrows frame the verbs and the pictures in order to emphasise the idea of upward movement. Two rockets add a dynamic to the same. The implied intermingling of contexts might surprise teachers raised on a thematic or mono-contextual view of communicative methodology, yet it should now be clear that the sense of analogy we are putting forward here entails the differently contextualised images that support and reinforce the same point. The class can use the verbs and pictures in the worksheet as pictorial cues to produce sentences that form a chain story. The teacher will generally have to begin with the example: ‘the sun came up and I sat up in bed’. The first student would repeat the teacher’s opening sentence then add: ‘I got up’, and the one after ‘I stood up’. The shift towards abstraction implied by ‘set up’ as in ‘set up an organisation’ caused problems when tried in class and implies a change of context that is more difficult to incorporate into the story. The teacher, however, has the option of maintaining the context by offering ‘I put up a tent, I set up a camp’ while digressing into other ways of using ‘set up’ such as ‘I set up a system or a company’. Another link from a physical towards an abstract schema is given in the second worksheet (Figure 6.3). Here, the abstract meaning of the last phrase, ‘back up’, is related to its physical referent by drawing one stick figure supporting another from the back while they continued to hold up ‘the pole’. Students can again be invited to shift from the concrete illustration of ‘back up’ to the more current abstract sense of ‘to offer support’ as in an argument. This presentation of ‘back up’ also underlines the way in which a phrasal verb will draw meaning from base metaphors that pertain both to its particle and its stem, or to the modification of one by the other. Thus, this notion of support invokes the prepositional meaning of ‘back’ which itself derives from the part of the body of the same name. The

162 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching Up is achieved movement Put up

Keep up

Hold up

Back up

Figure 6.3 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is achieved movement’

move towards an abstract interpretation of ‘upward’ becomes more pronounced when one considers the sense of ‘more is up’ then the closely related ‘up is positive’ or ‘up is more’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In putting forward this schema one must also insert the caveat that an increase can be negative as in ‘unemployment figures are up’. The relationship of ‘up is increase’ and the metaphor’s common relationship to a positive characterisation of mood or social state is given through the verbs grouped in the third worksheet (Figure 6.4). This worksheet groups its subject roughly into columns that with some backtracking typify increasing abstraction as one works from left to right. A base metaphor for verbs that use ‘up’ to indicate an idea of increase is given by the isomorphic relationship of the upward expansion of mercury in a thermometer to the notion of a ‘rise’ in temperature. Four sets of verbs are given, the first expresses ideas of a temperature increase, and the second an idea of an increase in speed, the third of size, through that of growth, and the fourth of quantity. However, as said, ‘up’ as in ‘add’ or ‘count up’ may also be expressive of a final end-point or an idea of completion. This is dealt with in the

Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 163 Up is an increase, more can be good, up is good, an increase is sometimes bad

1,2,3,4 count up 2+3+4+5 add up 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Save up Build up Put up (prices) Keep up prices

Go up, warm up, heat up

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

hurry up, speed up Grow up

Live it up Cheer up, liven up, freshen up

Talk up (values) Turn up (volume)

Figure 6.4 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is more and more sometimes good’

next worksheet, but its interrelationship with the idea of increase given here must serve as a reminder that the notion of a meaning that is metaphorically extensible entails an extension of the schematic frame from which its meaning evolves. This again shows how it is therefore difficult to deal with exact notions of schematic equivalence or reference when one schema may extend into another, perhaps through a point of transition such as is expressed here in a term such as ‘count up’. The next area deals with the accumulation of money or the ‘building up’ of capital, and the last marks a significant extension of the notion of ‘increase’, ‘rise’ and ‘plenty’ to that of happiness with ‘live it up’ and ‘cheer up’. In both this conceptualisation and the one preceding it, ‘up’ posits a static landmark or end-point whose attainment marks a degree of fulfilment or completion. The fourth worksheet (Figure 6.5) develops this notion of ‘up as accumulation’, first through the physical example of completion by filling up to a level, then through an abstraction of the landmark as something mobile and rotated but existing in space nonetheless; for example ‘keep up’ and ‘catch up’. Underneath these expressions of accumulation I have listed a set of verbs where ‘up’ connotes the achievement of

164 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching The end point is up

Full up

Make up, join up

Fill up

Keep up, catch up Freeze up, mist up, ice up, clear up, clean up, mix up, tie up, use up, burn up, dry up, eat up, heal up, do up, seal up, (time) is up

Split up, break up, divide up, tear up

Figure 6.5 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is an end point’

a landmark that has been abstracted out of any spatial reference. The right side of the sheet shows how certain verbs develop this notion of ‘up’ as signifying a completed action but in two opposite ways, that of separation and union, ‘split up’ is thus followed by ‘make up’. I have ignored how ‘make up’ of course also extends its verb stem more in accordance with its sense of fabrication or manufacture, as in ‘make up with lipstick’. Thus, somebody makes a new persona or ‘face’ for themselves and perhaps, thereby, ‘raises their status’ as if towards some point of self-completion. This complication graphically underscores how phrasal verb meanings, though they can be grouped and rationalised through an analysis of their particle, are also subject to an extension of the stem, sometimes as a result of its modification by the particle. Phrasal verbs are a complex area of meaning and full-scale rationalisation of their meanings according to underlying schemas, would be a daunting task. However, it is a task that could provide great benefits to the student. The fifth worksheet (Figure 6.6) develops the schema of ‘up is completion’ by showing the rotation of the attained landmark in order to

Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 165 Up is an end point The end point is up, to be up is to stop

Slow up, draw up, hold up give up Figure 6.6 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation of the particle ‘up is an end point’ Up is bringing lost subjects to the surface You can bring up hidden things and buried ideas Dig up things or unknown facts and information

Look up information Wake her up, she is deep in sleep, she is deep in thought (to be up is to be present and in mind), call her up, ring her up, phone her up

Ideas are buried in the mind, think up an idea, dream up a wild idea, come up with an idea

Crops come up, strange events are hidden until they crop up

Figure 6.7 Teaching phrasal verbs with the schematisation of the particle ‘up is bringing lost objects to the surface’

give the meaning of stopping or coming to a halt. The related verbs are given underneath. The sixth worksheet (Figure 6.7) perhaps marks the most complex schema. The landmark for ‘up’ is presumed to be a visible surface, and therefore the related verbs refer to the action of bringing ideas or things to that surface. ‘Dig up’ is perhaps the most concrete realisation of this idea and therefore heads the sheet. The counter-assumption of this landmark is that the revealed items were hidden or buried. Therefore one

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needs a grasp not just of the assumed landmark and schema, but of related schemas associating consciousness with ‘up’ (above the surface) and unconsciousness with burial, being beneath or deep down (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 15). Finally, it must be made clear that there is no sense in which these worksheets could be regarded as self-study or standalone guides to the area in question. They are above all a regrouping of a difficult set of lexical items around the metaphor from which their meanings are partly derived. This regrouping does not of itself preclude the need for other forms of practice. As stated, teachers need to set up other tasks in which these verbs are incorporated. These can take the form of the chain stories mentioned above, or another approach is to work with textual synonymy where the teacher tries to elicit or dictate a text that deals with the thematic area of some of these verbs but eschews their use. The students then rebuild the text around their knowledge of these verbs. Lastly, I should stress that I have given only one particle, ‘up’, quite extensive treatment. The objective as in most of what precedes and follows is to foster awareness of an approach to language and not to give an exhaustive account of how to tackle a single area. Clearly teachers can go forward to build on the work already done in this respect and to consider other ways to elucidate this difficult but central area of English. The key point is that prepositions and particles do not represent a random method of constructing meaning in English, where every instance must be treated as separate from every other. They can be grouped according to metaphorical theme and can be learnt as evolving from that common schema.

Tense and time The above exercises place students within the conceptualisations out of which a language is produced so that they may themselves become more adept producers of its forms. Establishing these also involves a diachronic analysis of grammar or the tracing of its emergence over time. Thus we are looking back to a particle’s early spatial meaning in order to find the metaphor through which it has evolved and schematised a different type of expression. We can also apply this diachronic principle to an area that often typifies what we mean by grammar, namely tense and the expression of temporal relations. If we apply this conceptual approach to the present continuous, we will not simply say that the tense is formed out of the copula and the verb⫹ing then set up pattern practices that try to schematise these routines. We might say that this tense is using an adjectival construction where in a phrase such as ‘Jane is sleeping’, ‘sleeping’ is a condition that

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Figure 6.8 Teaching the present continuous as an adjective that frames an action

is temporarily ascribed to Jane. In situational approaches to grammar, the present continuous as an expression of limited time was traditionally contrasted with the present simple as an expression of the unlimited. A more appropriate contrast could be between adjectives that signify a permanent condition and those that signify a temporary one. 76 He is rich vs He is making money. 77 He is old vs He is ageing. 78 She is adult vs she is growing. The use of italics underscores the relationship between the two constructions. This can then be developed through a pictorial metaphor where the adjective becomes a frame in which the subject takes up temporary abode, as shown in Figure 6.8. The frame simplifies and applies Langacker’s (1994) concept of boundedness, which applies to both mass and time. A lake is bounded by its shore and is therefore countable (a lake) whereas water is bounded and uncountable (some water). Likewise, time is unbounded or, in the above example, unframed, whereas ‘sleeping’, a bounded condition, frames the event with its beginning and end. Accordingly, students can be encouraged to build within them this concept of bounded and unbounded time. The situation that carries a structure is built out of a metaphor from which it has evolved. For example, the framed action is a teaching situation for the present continuous. The frame is built from the metaphor of boundedness through which the tense is conceptualised. Students are thus provided with conceptual principle and not just a social condition of use.

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Reference The use of the definite and indefinite articles in English can cause considerable problems to students whose languages do not possess them. Some types of use can be taught as collocates. For example, one can begin with a reference to items that generally occur as a singularity: ‘the moon, the earth, the sun’. However, instead of treating these as special cases one can treat them as prototypical because they involve items that are by definition singular. These items are a group of equivalent collocates. In other words, they make up a schema. The conceptual underpinning of this schema can be generalised to items which are made singular by their being situated by a name, in a place or in a set of circumstances. Thus one moves from: ‘the sun’ to items selected by a name ‘the planet Neptune’ while branching into other networks of related constructions, so that ‘the nation of Japan’ triggers ‘the city of London’ for example. One can plot this as a schematic family with branching patterns as is shown in Figure 6.9. In the figure, the lower group, ‘the earth I inhabit’, might normally be taught as relative clauses or as a function demanding the use of the same. However, these constructions are arguably as much about the definite article. Finally, one might perceive them as what they are, ‘constructions’, which entail a systematic organisation of certain parts of speech and the obligatory use of the definite article in the noun phrase (NP).

The sun The moon The earth

The planet Neptune The planet Mars The planet Uranus

The nation of Japan The city of London The government of America The heart of the city

The earth I inhabit The place I enjoy The world I like The city I live in Figure 6.9 Teaching the definite article as schemas branching from a prototypical instance of use

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Like the indefinite article in other languages, the English ‘a/an’ has evolved from the word ‘one’ (Heine, 1997). This is clearer in a language such as French where the numeral and the article are the same word. Some African languages also show how it is quite common for the word for ‘one’ to be derived from the word for ‘finger’ (ibid., 1997). It can also be seen in the English word for number, ‘digit’. In short, our anatomical structure becomes the means through which we conceptualise the abstract notion of number. In its turn, number is grammaticalised or abstracted further in order to become a form of indicative or article, that in English points out the ‘one’ among the ‘many’. Just as ‘a’ has evolved from ‘one’, it seems probable that in almost every language the definite article has evolved out of the demonstrative (‘this’ in English). Such an evolution is in accordance with the Hallidayan view of the definite article as having a referential function within discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1989). The diachronic insight into articles can also shape pedagogical strategies. If students are having trouble with the definite article, one can help them to latch on to its referential function by asking them to imagine one example of a given category and to metaphorically point to it, as if to where it lies back in their mind. For ‘a’ one should ask them to imagine first many examples of the category, then to randomly ask for one of them. I have operated this procedure with a guided fantasy that is loosely based on a theme used by Moskowitz (1978). Students are asked to imagine a collection of things that are precious to them, jumbled on a shelf: 79 You see there, all the objects that matter to your life ……. Take down an object ……. Turn the object over in your hands, examining it …. Put it alone on an empty shelf. Look at it, there on the shelf. …. Let the object remind you of a memory or a scene …… Recall the scene. ….. Look back at the shelf full of objects. The shelf is not full of objects but of memories. Take a memory. Examine the memory. The memory opens in front of you like a picture in a book. … Walk into the picture and explore the scene. …. Now slowly, step back from the picture into a room. The room changes into your classroom ….. Open your eyes. Turn to a neighbour and take the object and give it to them. Describe the object and say why you have given it to them. Another interesting exercise is more a thought experiment where the student picks a person from an imaginary crowd, then has to describe what

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the person is like and where they are going. They have to imagine they are following them. A neighbour then picks up the trail: Student: ‘They are continuing to white house.’ Teacher: ‘A white house? Who is?’ Student: ‘A man is.’ Teacher: ‘You mean the man with the blue suit?’ (pointing towards an imaginary person) Another student is asked to say who they are following. The next has to recount the story so far, taking the role of an observer who is watching the scene through a hidden camera. They say how student A spotted a man with a blue suit and followed them to a white house. In the house they saw them packing a bag. Meanwhile student B saw a woman with a grey suit. She also went to the white house. Thus people are singled out from an imaginary crowd, given an identity and followed back into the melee. The indicative or ‘pointing’ conceptualisation is maintained by the adoption of an observer’s perspective. There is an increasing confusion of trails being drawn through an expanding scene. The indefinite individual must take definite form before being tracked through the crowd. Students often request grammatical explanations. They would not do so if they did not believe that the conscious knowledge of a rule could help them towards a correct usage. Some teachers who respond to these requests may do so in the belief that their explanation may not do much to improve the ability of a particular student to use the form in question correctly. In this assumption, they may be supported by notions of acquisition, and the accompanying belief in grammar as an elaboration of innate forms. The reason for the apparently ineffectual nature of much grammar teaching may be that grammatical constructions are finally a concrete meaning that has been abstracted over time into the specification of a meaning relation. To offer an explanation as to how this specification operates could be to shift towards another level of abstraction. Even if largely understood, such explanations may be yet more distant from the schemas of concrete things and corporal existences out of which such meanings have been built, and to which we gravitate when we require practical understanding. Explanation posits another level of abstraction when we should perhaps be moving back to the substance that these sets of meaning relations required for them to express themselves at all. The other traditional solution to the ‘grammar’ problem is to isolate it as structure and to contextualise it as an illustrative situation or example. Thus, we teach ‘the’ by asking students to talk about ‘the moon in the

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sky’ or ‘the book that they want to give a friend’. The situation has the merit of providing practice rather than explicit knowledge, but assumes that the student will simply be able to generalise from one context to another. A further risk remains that the situation will simply absorb the structure into itself, making it the property of a particular context rather than showing how it might be available for more general use. To recast grammar in the metaphors from which it has evolved, on the other hand, might be to equip students with a guiding mnemonic that they can carry across the particularities of a given context. In this respect, we should also recall that the creation of mnemonics has been isolated as one of the strategies that permits success in language learning (Rubin, 1981). In my example with the articles, the mnemonic is created when ‘the’ and ‘a’ can be identified with a referential action that can be given diagrammatic form. In Figure 6.10, the relationship between the indefinite article and the idea of number is made clear. ‘The book’ is ‘one’ of many. This is contrasted with the demonstrative ‘the’ where the word itself is made to point to the single example to which the speaker now wants to refer. A teacher who wants to embed this type of contrast in a conventional situation can do so quite effectively, but should try asking the students to retain this image and extend its visual slots to the examples that the situation will unfold. The situation bears resemblance to the others outlined, and could recycle the theme of objects on a shelf as follows: 80 Imagine you are a thief in a rich person’s house. You can only take one example of anything that is there and just ten things in all. You are a kind thief so you will not take something if it is the only one that person has. You will not take the video because they only have one. You can take a TV because they have three. What will you take?

Ta Th ke a ere bo are ok. ma Hav ny e o n

e.

Give me the book

Figure 6.10 Metaphor showing the indicative nature of the definite article

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As students recount their answers, they should be encouraged to fix in their mind a prototypical instance of the action of taking one (book) from many. Then they can be told: 81 You have spread out all these 10 things in front of you. Say what you will do with each thing. You have to do a different thing with each one. Imagine that you are pointing to it as you are speaking. For example, ‘I will give the necklace to a friend. I will hang the picture on my wall, etc.’ Such procedures revisit situational methodology in some sense. However, my more innovative suggestion now is that teachers could think more carefully about how to search for a coincidence between a situation that is illustrative of how an item is used, the conceptual or image-schematic origins of that item, and a metaphor that illustrates its function of use. Further, teachers need to think about helping students not simply to retain a situation as an example of use but to treat it as a prototype from which to map it to a wider productive phase. The traditional PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) lesson presents the structure in a context of use, drills it, then proffers a context whose object was to stimulate its practice. However, as we discussed in Chapter 2, when looking at a student’s need to find similarities across contexts, a more interesting process than repeated practice would be to involve students more in the creation of an appropriate context by analogy to the situation in which the item is first presented. Thus, students would start from what is here the prototypical idea of theft endowing stolen objects with their singularity (‘a’ to ‘the’), the remembered object or the person in the crowd. They could then be asked to brainstorm for other analogous contexts: the chosen gift, the selected person, the hapless volunteer drawn from a reticent squad, an idea unearthed from the unconscious and shaped into a seminal theory, for example, pursuing each through its chosen narrative.

Expressing time Tense represents another area where metaphor can be used to elucidate quite complex rules of thumb governing use. Two types of metaphorisation can be employed. The first involves finding a metaphor, such as a time-line, to represent the constraints governing use. The second entails a closer focus on the process through which a given structure may have been grammaticalised. As with the article, we can use our knowledge of the grammaticalisation of the item in question to embed it in the

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metaphor from which it is derived. We can try to help students build a metaphor of explanation out of the metaphor that motivated grammaticalisation. Like other ‘grammatical’ items, tense also offers teachers the possibility of re-inserting a construction into the conceptual metaphor by which it was once fashioned. In their turn these metaphors may proffer a stronger sense of how the item is used. One problematic item in English is the distinction between the present perfect and past simple tense. Different languages structure the past differently and with varying degrees of complexity. The present perfect/past simple distinction is far from unique but causes considerable difficulty nonetheless. A curious but underexploited feature of both the present and past perfect is their use of what Heine (1993) identifies as a possession schema. It is as if the possession of an action represents its accomplishment. One has the action in hand, signifying our possession of it. A similar process can be found in the meaning shift of the English verb ‘keep’ (Heine, 1997): 82 83

They keep the money. They keep complaining.

Examples 82 and 83 show how a possession/storage schema is shifted from goods to an unfolding action. The result is a metaphor that kept things are continuing things. The pedagogical metaphor is the mental warehouse of individual actions. It is the thing that people perceive themselves as doing most constantly that can be built up as an attribute of the class’s collective mind, as shown in Figure 6.11. The present perfect also shows retained actions. The possession, whether signified by ‘have’, ‘avoir’ (French) or ‘haber’ (Spanish) is of the action described by the adjectival (participle) form that it normally precedes. Over time, this usage has been grammaticalised into the specification of a temporal relationship or tense. ‘Have ⫹ verb past participle’, thus, signals a temporal frame for the signified action without any enduring connotation with the notion of possession. In English the present perfect signifies an action that is continuing in the sense of being retained until the moment when the speaker makes their utterance. One method of exploiting this is to reify the verb, or make its past participle an object to which the student lays claim. Laying claim to the verb is made synonymous with laying claim to the action that it signifies. When implementing this idea, I explained it to a colleague and sketched a diagram for her. She first wrote out a set of irregular past participles on separate pieces of paper and distributed them among the

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I keep Eating too much Waking up Complaining Getting impatient

Figure 6.11 The possession schema: mind as a storehouse of continuing actions

students. Each student was asked to say which verb form they had; they were asked to use the form ‘I have’ as opposed to ‘I have got’ when they said this – ‘I have spoken’, for example. At the same time, they were told to try and remember who had which verb. In turns, they then had to point to different members of the class and say what they had with the form ‘he/she has’. The class could disagree about who had which verb form: Student 1: ‘He has “eaten”.’ Student 2: ‘No I haven’t.’ Student 1: ‘You are not hungry.’ Student 3: ‘No, she has eaten.’ (pointing to another student 4) Student 4: ‘That’s right, I have eaten.’ Inadvertently, the class was practising the present perfect through the schema of possession of the past out of which it may have been built. Though artificial in conception, the class sounded as if it had acquired a curious naturalness, building its practice with a steady rhythm that kept the teacher on the periphery. When all the participles had been found, the teacher asked the class what tense they had been practising. The class correctly identified the present perfect. The teacher then explained that they had been building and practising the tense in this way because it was really about the

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possession of the past. They used the present perfect when they could touch and feel the past, holding it as if it was in their hands. The second stage of the lesson had been planned around distinguishing the present perfect and past simple. For this purpose another metaphor had been planned, which involved drawing the plan of a prison as a rectangle on the board. The idea was that the past simple forms would be placed inside it and the past participles would be placed upon a drawing of the road outside. The basis for this was that past simple forms represented actions that were imprisoned in the past, while the past participles were acting as free agents and could be conscripted into actions that had been repeated since the past. Students could then use the verbs in the two ways that were appropriate to the verbs in question. Thus, a student who took the ‘imprisoned’ verb ‘read’ from the diagram below could have made a sentence: 84 When I was a child my parents read to me. I have often read to children since. A more conventional way to represent this difference would be with time-lines. However, although metaphorical in themselves, these diagrams create a conceptual gap between their generalisation of how to use a form and the context in which it should be used. They improve on the simple rule of thumb by giving it a visual illustration, but they are remote from the type of contextualisation that is a feature of both the communicative and the older, situational approach. In this exercise, the teacher tried to cast these prescriptions in the stronger metaphor of imprisonment in the past and release towards the present. Situational methodology might tacitly acknowledge this by making ‘the prison’ the illustrative example for the past simple. However, if forms are put forward as governed more by a situation than a rule, the student may not perceive how they should be generalised to other situations. Equally, there is the problem of the rule being overabstract and disassociated from the lexis that it can combine and the context to which it will respond. A better way must be to set the rule in a more concrete metaphor, one to which the appropriate realisation can actually be attached. Thus we can show that verb forms are imprisoned by being stuck inside the plan of the prison on the board. The past simple exists within the verbs it affects as these respond to our expression of a time from which we are cut off. When I discussed this class with the teacher, she confirmed that the students expressed interest in each of the stages. The students were somewhat perplexed by the first stage since a conventional pedagogical

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approach to the appearance of a semantic item (have) in a grammatical role (have done) is generally to deny it meaning. A classical notion of grammaticality is based upon that denial. As a result, almost all the teachers I have watched signal whether they are talking about ‘grammar’ or ‘word meaning’. They do not generally show how grammar may have evolved from word meaning. Conventional pedagogy thus disconnects ‘have’, the auxiliary from ‘have’ the verb of possession, as if any type of connection will confuse. Yet, the teacher did agree that this notion of an accomplished action as ‘owned’, as if in the hand, had made the structure more graphic and more memorable. On consideration, I realised that I had confused not just the lesson by overloading students with two different and distinct types of procedure, but also the teacher in respect of how the present perfect had been constructed. ‘The possessed action’ is a participle or adjective. Therefore any notion of possession should attach not to the verb action but to the object with which it agrees. Thus, the student should not hold the past participle in their hand but the noun phrase that it describes. This is made clear in French where the participle agrees with the noun object, as in ‘je les ai mangés’. The present perfect is not constructed out of the possession of an action but of a noun phrase and the action that describes it. The fact that the action describes the noun phrase is shown by the pattern of participle-object agreement. Where there is no object the perfect constructs with ‘être’. Therefore, the procedure I adopted in the above exercise may still have been overinfluenced by the old notion of grammaticalised verbs being regarded as the main pedagogical objective. This structuralist influence ensured that the exercise unfolded in the manner of an old substitution drill. The verb as a unit remained the focus of the practice and the rationale for the sentence in which it was set. A second difficulty arose from a different use of metaphor in each of the lesson’s stages. The class may have appreciated the explanational power of the prison metaphor. Yet, obviously, no notion of past simple construction attaches to the metaphor of imprisonment; a more graphic connection would have been made with a metaphor of confiscation – past simple events could be seen as confiscated or put in obligatory store, the present perfect could signify their possession and hence their release. Another approach involves using the space of the classroom to map time. When I tried this with colleagues, I arranged a group behind one volunteer who sat directly in front of me. I looked at him before speaking: Trainer: ‘This is the end, at the end you think of what you haven’t done. What haven’t you done?’

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The volunteer flinched visibly, surprised, then composed himself and replied that he felt broadly satisfied. However, he then remembered something: Trainee: ‘I haven’t fixed the roof.’ Trainer : ‘What else?’ Trainee: ‘I haven’t taken my children out.’ He began to recount a few other incidents, which I noted and distributed on pieces of paper to the class members sitting behind: Trainer : (sceptically) ‘So you’re satisfied with your life?’ Trainee: ‘Yes, I have done most of what I wanted.’ Trainer : ‘What’s that?’ He was vague and talked about fulfilment: Trainer: ‘You have fulfilled yourself?’ Trainee: ‘Yes, mostly.’ Trainer: ‘How?’ He talked about a sense of spiritual equilibrium: Trainer: ‘You found a balanced life.’ Trainee: ‘Yes finally.’ He then made a list of more general achievements, both in the classroom and outside. I also compiled a list. I gave the list to the another trainee in front and asked him to read the first item: Trainee:

‘I’ve fulfilled myself, mostly.’

I then waved a piece of paper and half-chanted: ‘But you haven’t fixed the roof’. I made as if to give him the paper then take it away. He maintained his equanimity: Trainee:

‘No.’

I got another class member to wave their paper and say something else he hadn’t done. They now did this every time the volunteer in front of

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them spoke, and began to sound like an eerie theatrical chorus: Trainee 2: Trainee: Class:

‘What have you done?’ ‘I have found a balanced life.’ (led by the trainer) ‘You haven’t taken your children out.’

Some of the teachers thought this procedure was too intrusive. The one who had volunteered to take the front role admitted to a sense of shock at the opening moment and at my appearance as their nemesis. The general view was the idea might work better in a more specific situation such as ‘I am leaving England tomorrow and there is still so much I haven’t done’. I also asked the group if the sense of the past event as being possessed or owned would make the tense more meaningful. There was some scepticism though no outright rejection of the idea. It may be that the present perfect is now grammaticalised in the sense that the conceptual metaphor ‘possession is completion’ out of which it has evolved is no longer active. We do not associate the completion of past events with their possession, though the ongoing grammaticalisation of ‘keep’ would argue against this. A more active schema builds upon the spatial representation of time with subsequent entailments of motion forward to the future and motion behind into the past. Teachers can explore the arrangement of time as classroom space; they can look at movement between different zones of time as they have been mapped onto the classroom floor or projected onto the board. For example, the teacher asks the class to remember an important event in their lives. They next ask one student to stand in a designated square, to represent a past moment. On different slips of paper they write down the actions they performed during this past time. The teacher asks them to take some of the actions with them and to leave others behind. They move towards another space, pausing before they reach it. The actions they take with them are those ‘they have done’, the actions left behind are those they did. The actions they take into the new square are those ‘they keep doing’.

Conclusions It is clear that cognition-based approaches to grammar are very much at the stage of suggestion, and that there is as yet little that can be passed on in the form of procedures ready for wholesale adoption. My objective here is as much to open a discussion as to pass on hard and fast methods about how to approach a given item of grammar. In this I am motivated

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by how my students have often expressed frustration at both behaviourist and acquisition-based approaches to grammar. Though based on entirely different views of language and mind, these approaches share the belief that a theoretical awareness of how to construct and manipulate form may interfere in that form’s implementation and practice. A student’s interest in obtaining this type of theoretical awareness is often difficult to ignore, even by teachers who insist that it will have little practical benefit. However teachers may be able to bridge the divide between theoretical and practical knowledge if they impart an explicit knowledge of grammar through the metaphors out of which that grammar has been constructed and according to whose principles it is used. It would seem a truism that language development is motivated by the need to communicate meanings. In order to achieve this, metaphors are lexicalised and lexis is grammaticalised. This process may occur in order to represent inbuilt mental structures or in order to evolve a more effective organisation of the mind/world encounters. Teaching grammar through the schema from which it has evolved may give students a surer grip upon what is at issue. Teachers can think more about using metaphors rather than situations in order to show how a grammatical structure should be employed. Such strategies would form part of an appeal to the metaphorical or analogical cast of mind that allows learning to take place at all. Above all we must understand that a syntax is governed by issues of meaning and grammar has evolved diachronically from an extension of the meanings of words rooted in mind-world interactions. Grammar, then, must be taught as a property of the meanings that language users wish to express. There is no stable concept of grammar, which can be constructed as a structure of mind towards which students can proceed step by step. Syntactic structures have probably evolved out of core principles of physical interactions between ourselves and the world or between the phenomena of the world as these are observed by us. Syntactic performance cannot of itself constitute a measure of progress through language, since it cannot accurately be extrapolated as a single principle that is distinct from meaning. Because the separation between grammatical and lexical meaning is unclear, teachers should be less focused on grammar as abstract patterns that have a high level of generality. They must also think about constructions that are affected by the nature of the lexis they combine and which constitute prototypical schema from which lower order generalisations can occur.

7 The Metaphor of Learning

The previous sections have looked at how a teaching approach built out of our sense of meaning as created through metaphor can help to: 1 Illustrate specific language points and improve students’ grasp of the same. 2 Forge a link between the way in which linguistic meaning has been constructed and the manner in which language is learnt. I illustrated these points with an outline of specific techniques and a recollection of their impact upon different classes, focusing on different types of teaching strategies and how they can emerge from the larger cognitive thesis I am putting forward. My argument has assumed that language learning is assisted by the development of both conscious and unconscious knowledge about how the language operates. An implication has been that a conscious or explicit understanding of the imageschematic basis of a language and the principles on which this is based can help the student to master and control that language. Yet many would question the assumption that explicit understanding of any linguistic form can help us achieve its intuitive mastery. The influence of form upon the development of second-language competence remains a controversial issue in second-language acquisition (SLA) research. Much research assumes that adults have some access to the faculties that allow children to acquire first language forms with unconscious ease. An access to such faculties, it is argued, would mean that learning more about a language is unlikely to help us use it more effectively and may even impede that process. Krashen (1985, 1989) assumes that there is a mental separation between the language that we acquire naturally and that which we consciously learn. Learnt language 180

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cannot become acquired language. Our knowledge about a second language cannot therefore help us towards achieving the reflexive mastery that is associated with the first. Less radically, but in a similar vein, Jordens (1996: 443) concludes: ‘it is not surprising that form-focused teaching, providing positive as well as negative formal input, does not appear to affect the development of intuitive structural linguistic knowledge’. His view is finally that what does change matters is ‘the right kind of input at the right time’ (ibid.: 443). We should not just question the effectiveness of a pedagogy that depends upon imparting explicit knowledge about language. Also subject to question is a pedagogy that analyses language according to structure or function then tries to foster a reflexive control of these items through controlled practice and the provision of an appropriate context of use. If language were acquired from the natural processing of input in a sequence which is in accordance with a universal mental predisposition, then the presentation of features for practice will have no effect upon that process. Therefore, there are two related acquisition questions that I now wish to address. Answering the first will lead us forward towards the second: 1 Is it any longer useful to put forward an approach to language teaching that will at some level involve students in thinking consciously about the nature of the target language? 2 Does the view of a metaphorical mind that we are putting forward have anything to say about the process of language acquisition and learning itself? In order to consider the first question, I will look briefly at the internal consistency of linguistic approaches to second-language acquisition. The second question will generate a discussion of how cognitivist metaphor theory and cognitive blend theory (CBT) can contribute to how we perceive the process of second-language acquisition. This discussion will raise the more practical issue of how this understanding can help teachers to devise an appropriate pedagogy. I will call approaches to acquisition ‘linguistic’ because of their perception that: ●

●

A second language is acquired through exposure to the right kind of language. Language is treated as a different system of knowledge whose acquisition requires dedicated properties of mind. It cannot be included in a larger discussion of learning and cognition.

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In my discussion, I will show how these arguments fail because of their internal inconsistency. I next show how this failure originates in a failure to take account of the cognitive basis of language and hence of secondlanguage learning. This will introduce the question of how the view of mind and metaphor I am putting forward can affect our construction of a cognition-based view of language learning.

Linguistic theories of language acquisition Before attempting this brief study of SLA, I should first make clear that my concern is with learners who are capable of extensive conscious thought about language. Therefore my interest is in post-pubertal second-language acquisition and/or learning. Whether our sense of metaphor could illuminate the territory of the younger subject is a question I will put aside for now. In respect of this group, I believe an SLA theory that ignores cognitive factors will be flawed for the following reasons: 1 There is no reliable way to distinguish acquired language knowledge from learnt language knowledge. 2 There is no satisfactory theory for how learnt and acquired knowledge interact to produce a given level of performance. Cognitive blend theory can provide such an explanation. 3 Linguistic theories of second language acquisition overstress the uniqueness of the language learning and acquisition task. 4 The conclusions of metaphor research in cognitive science do not support the generative position on which some of the more consistent positions about SLA are based. 5 There would seem to be little neurological support for an acquisition/ learning distinction that is based on modular structures of mind. Further, theories that exploit notions of modularity may not be consistent with the ideas from which they claim support. I will now discuss each of these problems in turn.

There is no reliable way to distinguish acquired language knowledge from learnt language knowledge For Krashen (1985 and 1989), the distinction between second-language acquisition and learning refers to the nature of the mental process through which we come to use a second language. Second-language

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acquisition (SLA) is natural and partly mimics the processes through which the individual acquired their first language. Learning is conscious and posits an ongoing conscious interference in the production and interpretation of language. The assumption is that the mind can employ one of two mechanisms when faced with the need to know a second language, an unconscious acquisitive one and a conscious learning one. A parallel assumption must be that there are factors in the linguistic environment to which a given subject will respond in order to trigger one or other of these mechanisms. There are thus situations that are clearly conducive to monitored learning and others to unconscious acquisition. In the first case, we might think of a grammar translation class, in the second a late night and slightly inebriated conversation with a native speaker. Yet the environment does not present itself according to this very neat dichotomy, neither do the mechanisms that respond to it. As Cook (2000) asserts, second-language acquisition is an inherently unstable process. The conditions under which it will occur involve states of mind and environment that not only fail to repeat themselves from event to event, but which are also subject to constant change within the experience of one individual. Explanations are bound to be inadequate when these depend upon the staged reconfiguration of a single and constantly reduplicated structure of mind. In respect of the thesis that there is a stable and identifiable demarcation between two modes of language mastery, we should remember that there are dozens of different environmental states where we drift between conscious and unconscious attention to our use of language. Native speakers may also make conscious efforts with language, and if this dichotomy were in play it would be difficult to know which faculty they would be using when, for example, they were trying to absorb and reproduce some of the different structures required by standard written English. Just as it is implausible to suggest that the mind switches between conscious and unconscious learning modes, activating the radically different mechanisms appropriate to each, so it is also difficult to identify forms of linguistic input which are different enough to trigger the different learning modes. For example, one could accept that SLA occurs in the country where the target language (TL) is the predominant mother tongue, and that this forms the naturalistic trigger while foreign language learning is consigned to the classroom. Yet, the world abounds with cases where children go to a school to be taught in a language that is not their mother tongue and which may not be indigenous in any

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sense. On the surface the school functions as a kind of second-language community in which the pupils perceive themselves as foreign. Such children may find no community outside school in which to practise the language; they may switch from classes where they consciously wrestle with that language to others where knowledge is assumed and they must focus on meaning. Once in the playground they may revert to some other community language. There is no clear sense in which such children are in a second or foreign language situation. If we consider the nature of the language input received by such learners we will find that it is also difficult to pigeon-hole any given type of input as the trigger for a conscious or unconscious mode of learning. To take a very simple example, a child encounters the term ‘a right-angle’ in a mathematics class. They encounter this term for the first time in a second language of which they have only partial knowledge. They are a good student and know they have to memorise the meaning of this term so they make a conscious effort to do so. Yet they do not memorise it as an equivalent to another term in their first language (L1) but as a sign that represents a meaning they have never really considered before. The learning process could be termed natural because the student is matching a new word to a new meaning in the way an infant does, or conscious because they are making a deliberate effort to commit the word to memory. SLA theorists might hold that the core interest is not this type of lexical learning. However, it is not difficult to envisage a similar case were the new lexis is embedded in a new structure and both are learnt consciously for reasons that are not primarily linguistic. SLA theory may judge the separation of acquired and learnt input according to the type of production and comprehension that is its product. One might hold that a correct and reflexive command of language will result from acquisition whereas a hesitant, considered and sometimes erroneous use suggests learning. Yet this is entirely circular. If language performance is largely correct and reflexive it is studied as an acquired competence. If the language performance is hesitant, deeply accented and grammatically flawed, it is considered learnt. There is no method with which to suggest the flawed language has in fact been acquired. In short, the acquisition–learning distinction is not open to disproof.

Generative theories of SLA The distinction between conscious and unconscious learning has a parallel in the distinction made between explicit and implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge of a structure such as the English present perfect

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would show itself through a correct use of the same by a student, and this knowledge is in the compass of every native speaker. Explicit knowledge would involve understanding the concept of time that the present perfect is normally used to express, and how the tense is composed of the auxiliary ‘have’ and the past participle of a verb. Early cognitivist theory characterised successful learning through the notion of automatisation. Automatisation supposes a transfer of learning from a conscious to an unconscious domain (Zobl, 1983). Thus, once patterns or routines are automatised they become part of the learner’s unconscious repertoire and no longer require a conscious exploitation of cognitive strategies. In other words, explicit knowledge becomes implicit. For Krashen (1985), however, a reflexive control of some feature of the target language does not suppose the successful automatisation of consciously learnt knowledge but the unconscious acquisition of the same. The route to a second language by learning and automatisation is held to be largely unsuccessful. Krashen (1985) consolidates the operations of explicit knowledge within what he terms the Monitor. Monitor theory supposes a mechanism where our explicit knowledge interferes with the reflexive control of language. As language learners we can understand this by remembering occasions where our understanding of how we ought to structure an utterance interferes in its successful production. However, according to monitor theory the development of a reflexive control cannot occur through conscious practice. Explicit language knowledge, far from becoming automatised over time, will actually interfere with intuitive language production. Teaching explicit language knowledge is at best useless and at worst detrimental to the acquisition of a reflexive control over the TL. For Krashen, teachers should counter the operations of the monitor by making sure that students are not put in the position of wanting or needing to extend their explicit knowledge of the TL. They should acquire language naturally from a comprehensible level of input. When exposed to such input, they will process and organise this language input according to the natural patterns with which they are endowed. The evidence for this natural sequential processing has been found in two phenomena: ● ●

a natural order of acquisition; and a silent period.

A natural order attests to how the mind will not produce linguistic structures in the order in which they are taught but according to a natural

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sequence of its own making. Accordingly, we acquire ‘the rules of language in a predictable order’ (Krashen, 1985: 1) where rules are here understood to be the rules of syntax or grammar. This proposal was supported by several studies. Brown (1973) has provided evidence to show that all children acquired certain morphological and grammatical features of English in the same sequence, and Dulay and Burt (1974) tried to show how a similar order could exist in children acquiring their second language. Their evidence was based on how children acquiring a second language tended to make the same mistakes in respect of particular morphemes in the same sequence. The second piece of evidence comes from a so-called silent period. This has been observed among children who may be put into a secondlanguage situation without any knowledge of that language. The child is silent for a period of time of varying length, unless coerced into speech by a language class. At some moment of their choosing they may then reproduce the language. For Krashen, this provides evidence for how acquisition can arise from the internal processing of input rather than from extensive self-motivated practice in speaking or reproduction. The hypothesis is that during silent periods the child is processing input in order to build the language knowledge that may at some later point result in production. However, there are two problems with using the silent period as evidence for the distinct nature of acquisition. First there is some doubt about the universality of the period (McLaughlin, 1987). Second, the child’s silence does not attest to the nature of the processes which will make language its later product. This points up another core weakness in Krashen’s acquisition theory, which concerns his failure to describe how the intake of the target language becomes uptake (ibid.). The suggestion is that in their silence the language learner has initiated the mental process that will spontaneously result in speech. But Krashen does not suggest how the language the learner hears will be processed, remembered, then later reproduced. One way to respond to Maclaughlin’s concerns about how ‘intake’ becomes ‘uptake’ was by reworking Chomskyan theory concerning firstlanguage acquisition within a second-language context (see for example Cook, 1985; Schwartz, 1987). Chomsky was reacting against the behaviourist view of language learning that sees the language that the infant hears as a stimulus to which they learn to cue a response. However, an implication is that one can only use the language that one has heard in the contexts to which the language refers. The problem here is that infants acquire a complete command of a first language

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without ever hearing that language completely. To hear a language ‘completely’ is anyway nonsensical because new utterances are always possible and not uncommon. In other words, the linguistic stimulus that triggers their learning is too impoverished to result in the learning that is actually produced. Chomsky’s well-known solution to this poverty of the stimulus in first-language acquisition is to suggest that some of the rules of language are wired into the brain. These rules are activated and reset by the language that the infant hears. The infant’s linguistic input is also organised by these rules, which are perceived as a universal grammar (UG). Universal grammar is held to be an autonomous core of rules that is common to all languages and to the language-using mind. A UG represents the parameters with which every human is born and which the infant subsequently uses to structure their seemingly random and incomplete linguistic input as the syntax that can generate a language. The child passes from an initial state when they possess only a universal grammar into a steady state where the rules or parameters of this UG have been reset according to the input of their first language (Chomsky, 1985). As the notion of a ‘steady state’ implies, the parameters of a UG are reset as the fixed and autonomous syntax or ‘i’ language which will govern the production and parsing of the language throughout its user’s life. Krashen’s thesis (1985) implies that successful second-language acquisition ultilises the processes used with a first language. His thesis therefore requires an inbuilt mechanism that the mind can use in order to structure and complete the limited second-language data to which it is exposed, in the way it does for first-language input. Universal grammar, which originally referred only to first-language processing, can provide this structure. The suggestion of some (for example Cook, 1993; Schwartz, 1987; Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994) is that the mature learner rediscovers the unconscious acquisitive processes of the infant by using their innate capacity to structure language from the impoverished and disparate linguistic stimuli by which they are surrounded. To allow universal grammar a role in the construction of second-language input may answer some questions about the nature of the mental processes involved in an input-based view of acquisition. However, the idea that mature second-language learners can access UG is problematic on two counts: first in respect of the theory on which it is based, and second in relation to the questions it tries to answer. I will first consider it in respect of the theory on which it is based. Chomsky’s perception of universal grammar is of a set of parameters that are innate and autonomous. The parameters’ autonomy also

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implies modularity in the sense of their being isolated from other mental processes. By this is meant that UG is a separate and autonomous feature of mind with which the human individual is born. The parameters of this module are reset by input from the first language with which the child comes into contact. A simple analogy would visualise UG as a series of electrical switches. The switches are wired in a particular way forming a pattern common to all people. The input resets the switches of the UG in order to create a given language grammar or i language, be it French, Ibo, Arabic or whatever. This entails that UG effectively disappears after the first language achieves steady-state and the child matures. UG becomes the ‘i language’ because it is restructured by it or because its parameters have been reset. The consequences of this are clear for those who claim a role for UG in the structuring of second-language input. Either UG is unavailable because it has vanished into the L1, or Chomsky’s original theory requires substantial modification if it is to accommodate a generative view of SLA. The problem with modifying Chomsky’s theory is that if UG is available to second-language input it would have to be somehow external to the part of the mind in which language, whether first or second, is supposedly restructured. It would have to be separate because otherwise it would be restructured into the steady state for which it was partly responsible. It would then cease to exist in its original form becoming unavailable to deal with the second language. Therefore, in order to hold onto the idea of a UG available to second-language learners, it would have to be isolated from the input that it structured. If this were the case, it would assume a different form. UG would no longer be a set of parameters that become the rules out of which a language is generated. UG would remain, as it were, underneath the language it has structured and available to organise quite different data. This is problematic on several counts. UG was not simply conceived as a faculty that organises input; it was a faculty that interacted with input in order to reorganise itself as the i language able to generate the syntax of a given language. The theory of a generative grammar requires this view if it is to maintain its consistency. If we say that UG is not integrated into the linguistic input that it has restructured, we are no longer certain about its location. UG could be a kind of filter that leaves its print on any unknown language input. If this were the case, second-language acquisition would enjoy more success than is normally the case and there would be no difference between the results achieved by adults and children. UG could be partly buried

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by the second language yet available as a kind of trace which can deal with new input. In this case it has no clear status as part of the brain that structures new language input or as part of the i language into which it structures that input. The problem that now arises is one of method of study and proof. The ‘generative enterprise’ is motivated by the desire to find in different languages the syntactic features that are common to all languages. It can search for these structures in one place only, in the languages themselves. This is axiomatic to its being a linguistic as opposed to a psychological or even a neurological theory. However, if UG summarises a set of regulatory principles that can be deduced out of a given language, then it must exist within that language, albeit as a set of transformations from its original form. In this sense Chomskyan theory is entirely consistent. However, SLA/UG theory is now stating that UG is more a filtration mechanism or mould for data from which it remains separate. If this is the case, then its forms cannot necessarily be deduced from the product (linguistic performance) for which it is responsible. If UG has a role in second language acquisition then this undermines the generative study of it. UG in this SLA conception is a factory that is distinct from its product. If we study the product in order to deduce the rules through which it has been assembled, we engage in informed guesswork. Chomskyan theory avoids this problem with a game analogy – we can deduce the rules of a game from the way a game is played, and so it is for language as long as those rules are not some trace feature of another larger structure left behind in the brain.

The modular mind The other profound difficulty for both Krashen’s second-language acquisition theory and other developments of it is the problem of how secondlanguage learners can claim to learn language and finish with a workable though sometimes imperfect knowledge. Schwartz (1999) answers this question by developing Fodor’s (1985) theory concerning the modularity of mind. It is evident that our brain divides the way we process different senseexperiences. Unless we are suffering from a rare condition called synaesthesia, the input from one sense does not interfere with that of another. We do not smell what we see or feel what we taste. Perceptual processing can therefore be described as modular. Fodor (1985) assigns sight, smell and touch each to separate modules to cope with their very different kinds of data. He also gives language its own module. Fodor’s argument

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for the existence of a module dedicated to language input is first that just as we have no choice but to recognise visual input, so we have no choice but to recognise the input of languages that we know as meaningful language. Language processing is complex, more complex than playing chess, for example. Different learning experiences and abilities affect our ability to play chess. Therefore language must be part of some modular perceptual system that is outside the normal operations of cognition. The importance of Fodor’s views on modularity for students of firstlanguage acquisition should now be clear. He places what he perceives as the most important linguistic operations within an input module that is similar to those dedicated to other sensory inputs. Whether they pertain to feeling, sight or language, such input systems will have within them structures which organise the data with which they are provided. Equally these innate modular structures will also have their parameters reset by the input they receive. For Schwartz (1986, 1987, 1993) modularity suggests a solution to the problem of how older students can both possess acquired and learnt language knowledge at the same time. Holding to Krashen’s acquisition/ learning distinction, Schwartz advances a hypothesis where language knowledge can be divided into two kinds, with each occupying a different module, encyclopaedic or consciously learnt, and that which is naturally acquired through the involvement of a still available universal grammar. She has allotted each of these types of second language its own place or module within the mind and thus reinforces Krashen’s (1985 and 1989) view that learnt language knowledge cannot become acquired knowledge. In essence, Schwartz (1986, 1987, 1993) is seeking to have modularity both ways. The adult is allowed the capacity both consciously to assemble language knowledge and to retain this alongside that which has been unconsciously filtered through the intact UG of the input system. However, there remain many unanswered questions concerning the relationship of both these language modules to other functions of language and mind. The immediate problem is that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that explicit language knowledge can be automatised and its application can become reflexive. For example, Gregg (1984) argues that he could observe his own automatisation of the learnt components of a language. According to McLaughlin’s (1987) model, language is like any other complicated skill that is built out of modular or distinct processes. In the earlier stages of language learning these processes are fractured and not fully developed in themselves. Learning entails the amalgamation of the processes, the learner’s fuller control over them and their consequent

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automatisation. Such an account would seem to offer a better account for the learner’s sense of their integration of explicit routines into an implicit, automatised repertoire. In Schwartz’s account, the proceduralisation of explicit knowledge described by McLaughlin must either occur within the encyclopaedic module or as a result of some ‘cross-talk’ between it and the language module. If there is such cross-talk then the language-module would be communicating with general cognitive operations in a manner that jeopardises its modularity. If proceduralisation or part-proceduralisation occurs in the encyclopaedic module, then second-language learning is effectively a cognitive operation and we no longer need Fodor’s language module. Therefore, if second-language learning employed a different module to acquisition, that module’s operations would be cognitive and they would form the type of operation we wish to describe and in which most language learners engage.

Cognitivist and generative positions Thus far I have examined the problematic nature of second-language acquisition theory in relation to the Chomskyan theoretical position on which it is largely based. I will now reexamine this issue in respect of a metaphor-based view of conceptualisation and of the relationship between language and cognition that I am putting forward. The first problem, raised in our discussion of syntax and meaning in the last chapter, is that language has many cases where meaning controls syntactic structure. The first example I gave concerned idioms of the schematic or structural kind such as ‘the further you rise the harder you fall’. Other examples were Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) case of semantic parallelism or Langacker’s example of how idiomatic constraints mean that ‘John gave the fence a new coat of a paint’ cannot be the consequence of movement from ‘John gave a new coat of paint to the fence’. If there is no autonomous syntax controlling meaning there can be no universal grammar controlling the acquisition of either a first or a second language. A second and related point evolves from how Chomskyan syntax must be viewed as autonomous or separate from other mental functions. Edelman (1992) has pointed out that there is no neural network in the brain that does not have neural input from other parts of the brain (cited Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 480). The picture of cerebral activity in relation to language that is now emerging is scarcely consistent with

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the type of modularity that Fodor’s position assumes. Traditional brain damage studies, such as those of Broca (1865) and Wernicke (1874) supported the idea of language modularity by associating language impairment with the two brain areas that now bear their names. Broca’s area in particular had been associated with syntactic and grammatical problems, though initially more in respect of reproduction and thus of motor control (Deacon, 1997: 284). Yet a problem with brain lesion studies is that they are only associative (ibid.). If a language function is impaired after damage to a given area, that area is implicated in the performance of that function. Imagine that after the lights went out in a house and despite having no knowledge of electricity one finally traced the problem to a faulty fuse box. One might then implicate the fuse box in the production of electricity, but clearly it would be wrong to do so. Additionally, we may need to ‘stop conceiving of the localisation of brain function’ (ibid.: 285) as if sight or language were simply products of the same. Brain functions may be organised according to an entirely different logic from language functions. Language could thus be perceived as selecting brain areas that suit its particular needs, yet languageassociated areas, whether Wernicke’s or Broca’s, do not show any anatomical distinctiveness. Their lack of distinctiveness casts doubt on Chomsky’s (1985) contention that finally a language competence must have biological existence, unless by biological we mean only the connections that are formed in a standard neurological structure, as opposed to those that are performed as the universal structures that arrange input. Furthermore, one view now is that areas associated with language should be perceived more as ‘bottlenecks’ in the neurological activity that constitutes language, and less as the organs that bear final responsibility for it (Deacon, 1997). Penfield and Roberts (1959) initiated the move of brain-function localisation studies away from a dependence upon negative evidence or damage. Penfield discovered that he ‘could selectively interfere with the different language tests that he gave his patients’ when he ‘passed low level electric current into the cortex near the presumed language areas’ of the brain’s left hemisphere (Deacon, 1997: 289). Penfield’s studies do possess some broad consistency with those based upon negative evidence. But, overall, it is noteworthy that he found symmetry in the posterior and frontal functions which indicates a wider distribution (ibid.). By this one means that the language functions activate brain sites at the front of the cortex as brain lesion studies might predict. However, interestingly, these functions are mirrored by similar activity at the back.

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Technological advances have since permitted more detailed studies. Ojeman (1953, 1979) concludes that although there is some consistency between individuals, this is far from absolute. The brain does not suggest the rigid subdivision of functions of other organs. Although specifiable, language localities do show some variation. Such variation occurs in regions whose neural architecture is common to the rest of the brain. Individual variations in locality and a common neural structure do not support the picture of a language module as a physical entity possessing capabilities that are unique to it. Even less plausible is the mind’s exploitation of that common architecture in order to separate the operations of language according to the nature of the linguistic input received.

Student errors, CBT (cognitive blend theory) and the remodelling of second-language learning A naïve assumption of some SLA research is that if a student is taught structure x or lexical item y, then fails to reproduce it correctly after a given interval, the related pedagogy is deemed ineffective. The failure to reproduce a taught form is then used as evidence for ineffectiveness of teaching explicit knowledge about forms. Pedagogy of any other subject matter operates on the assumption that learners do not always learn what they are taught. In language the capacity of every infant to acquire two or more languages questions the effectiveness of teaching and learning strategies that do not enjoy a similar success. The fact that adults who acquire one or more languages in infancy operate those linguistic systems with flawless ability raises questions about the processes through which adults fail to achieve an equal mastery. However, we should perhaps put aside the issue of infant acquisition simply because it is accomplished during infancy without its consequence, language. A related false assumption is the wrong–right approach to student errors. Language errors can reveal how the student is on an approachpath to the mastery of a correct linguistic response to a given context. They can also reveal how they are quite far astray. When we considered the concept of a construction grammar we saw how constructions exist at different levels of generality. We can plot a student’s approach path through the degree to which an error reflects how far the student can generalise the construction that has been misconstrued. This will become clear if look at examples 85–7: 85

I coach’s motion see. (author’s data)

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86 A coat is an object which we support to disturb the wind. (author’s data) 87 The first problem is the comprehensive school because every child has variable ability. (author’s data) Sentence 85 reveals a misunderstanding of one of the core schematisations of English and many other languages. This is the subject, verb, object (SVO) word order, or the pattern where the subject is followed by a verb and then an object. The word order reveals how English, like other SVO languages, closely reflects a basic schematisation of agent (in this case a subject initiating an action), action (verb) and the phenomenon affected by the action (the object). A failure to reproduce this pattern may reflect a failure of schematisation that can reflect a large number of sentences. The effect on a subject’s utterances may be intermittent, according to how far the word order has been proceduralised or the nature of the constructions in which it has been embedded. Some constructions may take the form of schematised lexical chunks which embody a correct word order. Yet errors, such as the one cited, may reflect the failure to deduce and apply a general abstract principle to a novel lexical combination. In sentence 86, we see a problem that roots in a lower-order generalisation. The problem concerns the construction of the categories ‘coat’ and ‘support’. ‘Support’ landmarks the supporting agent as under the object it supports. A ‘coat’, when worn, is not a compact object that is even capable of support. It must hang from its wearer. The way in which English constructs the category of ‘support’ governs how it can be used. A failure to grasp this category and its accompanying rules of use make this sentence wrong. ‘Disturb’, in 86, is also problematic and ensues from another failure to construe how English constructs a particular category. Finally, ‘coats’ are conceptualised as helping to keep out the wind. ‘Disturb’ connotes an actor. To me, ‘coats’ in English represent a category that is too passive to intrude upon the wind’s activity. It is interesting also that the prototypical function relates to wind and not to the more general concern about cold, tempting a supposition about a cultural effect, perhaps relating back to a climate where it is winds that disturb the more habitual warmth. The larger point made by sentence 86 is that we can see how the conceptualisation of categories in a language governs the forms that can be used with them. The accurate rendering of what would traditionally be construed as English syntax means that these errors might conventionally be termed lexical. Yet another way to see ‘a lexical error’ is as

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oa Ic

High level of generalisation: word order schematisation

ch

’s m

oti

on se e Ac o su at is pp or t an o b to dis ject tur wh bt i Th he ch w ef irs win e tp d rob lem is sc the ho ol comp reh en siv e

a failure to acknowledge the quite specific constraints of English category construction. Sentence 87 (The first problem is the comprehensive school because every child has variable ability) is also syntactically correct while failing to acknowledge the constraints of category construction. Many native speakers might see little wrong with this sentence from any perspective. The student is describing how a school system divides students; they are not referring to a problem in the nature of the school but in its operating procedure. The error originates not so much in the general conceptualisation of a category but in the manner in which it should be perceived in this very specific context. The larger context tells me that for this construction, ‘the problem’ is not ‘the school’ in the sense that ‘the problem is John’ when he is disrupting a group dynamic. The problem is the operating procedure of the school. The problem is therefore situated in the school and the student should have conceptualised it as an object that should have been found there as in the correct: ‘the first problem lies in the comprehensive school’. From these three errors we can now see how we could construct a linguistic approach path according to the generality of the error that has been made. The error sequence illustrated in Figure 7.1 shows reducing degrees of generalisation. The first, which fails to realise basic word order and the schema in which it is rooted is of a high order. It posits an extensive failure to reproduce correct forms. This is not to say that the student who produced this will always produce incorrect sentences of

Mid-level generalisation: failure in category conceptualisation resulting in an unacceptable extension

No generalisation: failure to construe context Figure 7.1 Approach path errors: how errors reflect constraints that are of reducing generality

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this type, rather that the potential of this type of error to affect their production of language is great. The second level of error refers to how our construction of a linguistic category will govern the terms that will be used with that category. It reflects a much lower order of generalisation because it refers only to how we perceive specific items of lexis. The student may construct some correctly while failing at others. The last is a reference to how the student conceptualises a given context. The sentence could stand as correct if the context were different. The problem does not lie in the boundaries of the category itself but in the misapplication of a part of it to a given context. It is therefore a failure that is specific to an utterance. In this case, it could pass undetected by any but the more pedantic pedagogue. Three larger points should be made. The first is that making this kind of analysis needs a strong sense of the image-schematic origins of abstract thought and even of the cultural construction of meaning that is operating through it. Without this, the likelihood is that some errors may be corrected but left unexplained. These sentences are incorrect because the categories that they deal with have been grasped in a way that does not match the conventions of English. The second point is that the problem of category construction raises questions about secondlanguage acquisition as a process that can be analysed through syntactic and grammatical failure. The picture is of grammar, syntax and category meanings working in conjunction with each other in order to reflect how a construction can unfold. The third point is how we can treat these errors as further evidence of what Gibbs (1994) calls a poetics of mind. Sentence 86 (A coat is an object …) is finally an inadvertant metaphor and shows metaphor-making as a substitute for precise lexical knowledge.

Towards a blend-structure model of second-language learning Building on how Ellis (1990) framed the problem, we can say broadly that a theory of second-language (L2) acquisition must account for the following: 1 How language learners can combine and use implicit and explicit knowledge. How they proceduralise (explicit) knowledge (Ellis, 1990). 2 How learners make use of their L1 in order to acquire the L2. 3 How a knowledge of an L1 impedes the acquisition of the L2.

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4 How learners are able to combine sometimes impoverished and incomplete episodes of second-language input in order to create a larger model of the L2. 5 The critical age hypothesis (why younger learners achieve a better result) and why very young learners will lose language rapidly (attrition). 6 The evidence for a natural order of syntax acquisition (Ellis, 1990). 7 The unstable and unpredictable nature of a process that is a response to almost infinitely variable sets of individual and environmental constraints To satisfy these requirements, I will now advance a blend-structure model of acquisition by looking at student errors. I will then show how that model accounts for the above features.

Cognitive blend theory (CBT) and language learning Selinker’s (1972) concept of an interlanguage redirected linguistic and pedagogic interest towards student errors. Errors were viewed not so much as a failure to achieve the forms of the target language (TL), but as evidence from which one could construct the unstable language knowledge that the student had achieved at a given point in the learning process. My approach will treat errors not so much as evidence of the unstable knowledge that has been achieved as of the process of learning that is unfolding. This process will be characterised as a series of cognitive blends. The CBT model I am putting forward assumes that errors are an inevitable product of the intermingling of three core sources of knowledge. These sources will blend in a dynamic and sometimes unpredictable fashion producing results that because they are often not the direct result of that pedagogy will seem to nullify its success. Blending is a reactive and intuitive process whose products are available for both unconscious and considered use; it can result in correct products and in incorrect and unpredicted ones. The student’s uptake of knowledge is a result of the blend processes that are activated by the learning situation. These processes are unique to them and are a product of the knowledge construction and schematisation that has preceded them, the context in which they now find themselves and the way they respond to it. A second assumption would be the argument that language constructions reveal how meaning can govern syntactic form. They are schematised on an approach path of different orders of generality, from the

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low-level lexical phrase, through the middle-ranked idiomatic pattern (the faster you do it, the better it will be) to the higher-level word-order principle. Higher-level structures are necessarily more abstract in that they pertain to the organisation of lexis rather than to properties of words themselves. The consequence would be that grammar is best grasped through techniques that encourage students to grasp phrases and patterns that have a lower order of generality. These can serve as prototypes which will allow for a more productive use to be made of them when they are applied to other lexical strings. Such a principle should make clear that grammar teaching often fails because it is either overabstract and overgeneral, or overspecific and rooted in a particular context. When teachers base grammar teaching on explicit and highly abstract rules it will be remote from the schema through which the rules are stored and from which they are generalised. When, as in structuralist methodology, the prototypical examples are embedded in a context of remote or limited relevance, students may unconsciously reject the schema as having the potential to express their mind–world interactions. This makes clear how an affective approach can help students to take emotional ownership of a form, treating it as material fit for their future expressive needs. If, as in some functional methodology, a schema is treated as the property of a particular example it may be unconsciously tagged as a prototype of limited relevance, being consigned to the oblivion of the context in which it was introduced. A given student will come to class with the schemas of their mother tongue and those they have successfully and unsuccessfully acquired from their exposure to the TL. If we assume a learner whose exposure to meaningful input from the TL is effectively zero, then the starting point must be the treatment of the second language as an unfolding analogue of the first. As in any analogical process an intuitive response is to seek structural likeness in superficial difference. The failure to find enduring structural likenesses at different levels of generality forces an acceptance and thus an increasing schematisation of the differences. This evolving schematisation of ‘difference’ can be contained by Selinker’s (1972) concept of an interlanguage as an unstable system. It is being developed out of a conscious and unconscious processing of the student’s encounter with the L2, the precepts that they have inherited from the L1, and any natural acquisitive structures that have not been masked by the fact of having an L1. We can therefore see an interlanguage as a partially schematised set of different blends. In primary stages, there are arguably two types of

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blend occurring: ●

●

Between the inherited conceptualisations of the L1 and the quite minimal input of the L2. Between the universal perceptual principles that are a prerequisite for language, and the quite minimal input of the L2.

However, almost immediately we have to account for a third type of input, that is the interlanguage model itself, or the current state of the student’s target-language knowledge as it is a blend of the two types of input described above. The additional input to the blend is therefore from: ●

The model of the TL as it is currently constructed (the learner’s interlanguage).

In the first blend type, I use the phrase ‘inherited conceptualisations’. Inheritance is used here in its cognitive sense, to explain how we can conceptualise phenomena that we have never seen or known. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) example is the electric car. People who have never seen an electric car know what it is; they know this because they inherit a sense of what is meant by electrical power, with its power source as a battery. They also inherit from the idea of a car the concept of four wheels, steering, bonnet, luggage space and passenger compartment. In Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998, 2002) conception, there are many inherited features of the electrical vehicle and the fossil-fuel-powered car that are not counterparts available for mapping one onto the other. For example, a British person of a certain age may construct an electric car from the inherited attributes of a typical West European automobile and that very British contrivance, an electric milkfloat. These emerge as distinct features of a blend product, giving us an object with the float’s battery instead of a car’s petrol tank, and a car’s steering wheel and passenger compartment instead of the float’s handlebar and carrying platform. In language learning, inheritance operates with schema of varying generality. It could be something as basic as the implicit knowledge that actions are not objects and that language recognises this difference by treating each differently. With or without explicit instruction, this central inherited assumption from the L1 will be mapped onto the counterpart of the L2. We can see this in the word-order error, ‘I coach’s motion see’. An inherited assumption as to the separateness of actions and people

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results in the learner treating them as if they were ordered according to the subject–object–verb pattern of their native language. Conceptualisations refer to the ‘conceptual metaphors’ that the student has schematised both as developmental universals and primary metaphors (Grady, 1997). Conceptualisation also involves the construction of categories which may differ between cultures and languages. In the process of learning, a given term may be grasped as a singular translated meaning and that meaning is not understood as the metonym of a larger radial category. Yet it is sometimes the larger category that controls how the term is used. We can see this when an advanced student recently told me ‘they had fulfilled their needs on my course’. My reply was that ‘needs’ were an ‘appetite’ requiring satisfaction. ‘Needs’ were not the stomach or container needing to be filled full or ful-filled. The second blend type is between the universal perceptual principles that are a prerequisite for language and the quite minimal input of the L2. The basic perceptual principles will begin with those broadly identified by Markman (1994) as three assumptions that infants must exploit when they develop their ability to name objects (see Chapter 5). These are: 1 The whole object assumption (knowing that a whole object is a sum of its parts and can be indicated through one of them). 2 The taxonomic assumption (assigning the same category to phenomena that are not identical). 3 The mutual exclusivity assumption (knowing not to give one object two different names). There are other assumptions such as the action–object distinction which may be categories created by language in the manner suggested by Derrida (1972), or which may be inherited as one of language’s preconditions. If a precondition, these principles are the pre-syntax that seeks representation in language organisation. Thus cause and effect (agent/ patient) relationships are derived from the understanding that an action by definition is perceived through the impact it has upon an object and requires agency. These principles set up basic, verb–noun categories as implicit or proceduralised knowledge which can be inherited by the acquisition process. Of course, the fact that the learner has an L1 available to them also means that they can make these principles explicit. For example, the learner can try to grasp a whole object as the sum of its parts, separating out the different meanings of each part, then re-categorising them as belonging to a whole.

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After the learner has grasped some rudiments of the TL, a third area of input is from the interlanguage model itself. Thus a learner overgeneralises a grammatical rule, as when a student apologised for their lateness with the excuse: 88

I hurted my leg. (author’s data)

The overgeneralisation has blended a morpheme derived from other past tense forms with a verb that the language’s grammatical norms have endowed with a different form. Equally, sentence 89 either overgeneralises the adverb form or the construction ‘hardly’ from the wrong context (I can hardly manage), or is a blend with multiple inputs that uses both to reinforce the same error: 89

I practise hardly. (author’s data)

Pronunciation errors are themselves a continuing product of this type of blend structure. If they originate in a misperception of L2 input, then this may be because the target-language input is intuitively blended with the phonology of the L1 as the only system of phoneme or syllablebased differentiation that the student can access. This blend creates the perceptual mechanism through which the input is filtered, and the degree to which the blend is schematised may determine the degree to which its phonological errors are fossilised. The age-related degree of mind/brain plasticity may also determine how well the blend endures as a schema. Let us take the case of an ideal speaker-hearer, that is a speaker-hearer who is treated as if unaffected by context and who has had no exposure to their target language. Although this person is implausible in reality, they serve to illustrate the process shown in Figure 7.2. It should be made clear that this is not an illustration of how an individual targetlanguage phoneme is treated, but of the larger process that underpins that treatment. A learner will hear input from the TL. In Chapter 1 we saw how metaphor can be the product of an encounter with an unknown or poorly formulated category. The unknown phenomenon is perceived through the known – electricity as liquid for example, giving us current. In this case a blend is activated because of how an unknown language constitutes the challenge of a problem needing a solution. Data from the TL constructs the input 2. The blend structure counterpart mapping then ensues because of the learner’s recognition that they should

202 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching Generic space

Input 2

Production of a given phoneme

TL Phonetic input

Input 1

L1 Phonology Blend

Interlanguage phonology

Figure 7.2 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a second-language phonology: step 1

process the TL input as constituents of meaning. A constituent that does not have a recognisable counterpart will blend with the one that most approximates to it. That blend produces a distorted perception of the L2 that in production would be familiar as the accented speech of a foreign language learner. As a result of conscious effort, or continuing exposure, the blend may itself be schematised as part of the learner’s interlanguage. This provides input 1 with a secondary source of input, that of the interlanguage. We can see this in Figure 7.3. The second blend of a now established interlanguage phonology with the TL’s phonetic input produces a blend that shifts further towards that input and away from the phonological system of the L1. In the idealised learning model that an adult rarely achieves, the weighting will shift the learner’s input 1 towards that of a native speaker. A final but, for the adult learner, generally unobtainable result will be perfect counterpart mapping between the perception of auditory input and the input 1 as this is weighted by schematisations that have shifted towards those of a native speaker. If this were to occur, the interlanguage would no longer be an interlanguage.

The Metaphor of Learning 203 Generic space

Input 2

Production of a given phoneme

TL Phonetic input

Input 1

Interlanguage phonology 1 Blend

Interlanguage phonology 2

Figure 7.3 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a second-language phonology: step 2

Factors that influence these weightings will be age and degree of exposure. The critical age hypothesis can be related to a decline in mind/brain plasticity and thus to the strength of the schematisations to which the TL input is referred. Older learners will have a stronger and more enduring schematisation that will weight the blend towards existing phonological knowledge, resulting in the perpetuation of a deviant pronunciation. However, an input 1 (the interlanguage input) may be adjusted by other factors. The factors that help post-pubertal learners to compensate for their inclination to weight the blend towards their existing phonological systems begin with the conscious understanding that they may have developed of their own phonology. Goswami and Bryant (1990) call this understanding their metaphonological awareness. Language teachers and teachers of reading are consciously and unconsciously engaging students in exercises that raise their metaphonological awareness. For example, when they break down a word into its constituent phonemes in order to help students spell, read or pronounce it, they are making students aware of the phonological construction of a word that was previously understood intuitively. A heightened awareness may entail

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a conscious attempt to compensate for the strength of the existing system in favour of the input by analysing its constituents and trying to suppress L1 interference. The success of such procedures is far from assured, however. Let us take the case of a literate French learner of English. The learner perceives a word ‘that’ as a blend which shows the effect of their L1 or interlanguage phonology, producing a form that could be alphabetically transcribed as ‘zhat’. Their metaphonological awareness furnishes them with the understanding that there is either a mismatch between the data and their blended perception of it or between their production and that perception. This awareness may be produced by pedagogical feedback. Accordingly, they may attempt to suppress the input from their interlanguage and weight it towards the L2. They will do this with such strategies as monitored solo or group repetition of auditory input, thus attempting to weight their interlanguage production towards a perceived target language model. I show this process in Figure 7.4. In the figure, the learner produces two types of blend. The first, on the left-hand side of the diagram, is between their current interlanguage model (ILM) and the input from the L2. The product is a further development of the interlanguage (IL). The second blend would be a product of their metaphonological awareness as this derives from the L1. This model is blended with input from the L2 developing a metalinguistic model, in this case of how the L2 should sound (MLM L2). This metalinguistic

L2

ILM

MPM L1

L2

MLM L2

IL

IL2 MPM = Metaphonological model MLM = Metalinguistic model Figure 7.4 Blend-structure model of language learning showing metalinguistic interference

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model of the L2 will blend with the IL, weighting it towards itself and thus triggering a further development in the interlanguage. How far this will succeed will be subject to immense individual variation. Now let us consider how this would work in the case of the lexicogrammar or a construction. Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 146–54) show how we develop a simple grammatical structure from a blend pattern. Thus, they take an XYZ structure: 90 Elizabeth (X) is the daughter of (Y ) Hieronymous Bosche (Z ). (author’s data) and show how Y, ‘the daughter of’, can be constructed in Figure 7.5. ‘Daughter of’ prompts us to ‘call up an input space’ that is structured by our concepts of kinship and progeneration. At its most basic ‘a daughter of’ assumes ‘a father’. This shows how ‘the noun-phrase’ in a Y expression may assume some common relational frame to X, such as ‘husband–wife, boss–worker, master–apprentice’ (ibid.: 148). ‘Daughter’ and ‘father’ are then projected into the blend, as shown in the figure. The blend constructs the relationship with open-ended connectors to the items under discussion. ‘Father’, in this case, is connected to Hieronymous Bosche and ‘daughter’ to Elizabeth. Now let us consider how this would work in the case of the combination of syntactic and lexical errors cited above: 91

I coach’s motion see. (I watch the coach’s movement)

Daughter

Father Input space Daughter

Father

Blended space Figure 7.5 Blend-structure model of an XYZ sentence Source: Fauconnier and Turner (2002).

Open-ended connector (Elizabeth)

Open-ended connector (Hieronymous Bosche)

206 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Coach Instructional example Open-ended connector

Input space Coach

Instructional example

Open-ended connector

Blended space

(fails as motion)

Figure 7.6 Blend-structure model showing a failed category connection

In this case the speaker is talking about learning golf, and a frame of sport instruction is invoked. The speaker wants to express how they must learn from the example of the coach. The speaker is correct in their assumption that we have a relational or possessive frame in respect of the example we set, ‘we follow our teacher’s example’. In sport, or, more narrowly, in golf, the trainer’s example invokes the frame of movement. Therefore the frame of an instructional example calls up an input of movement. The coach and their movement are then blended as something worthy of observation (Figure 7.6). However, the learner’s attempt at this sentence has already started to go wrong. The conventions of English distinguish movement and motion. First, ‘motion’ in English connotes something enduring. The selection of ‘motion’ therefore fails because the way in which English constructs the category of movement has not been schematised. Another problem is how English treats the category of ‘observation’. English divides ‘observation’ according to the duration of the act that is being observed and the deliberateness of the act, as between ‘watch’ and ‘see’. Instructional examples are not fleeting and students are supposed to heed them. They should therefore be ‘watched’. If this sentence were a correct construction, the quality of movement would govern the way in which that movement is observed. Again the wrong input has been selected resulting in the selection of the wrong word. A final error occurs, threatening communicative failure. Normally the agent of an observation would be a subject and the role of being

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Generic space

Observation Input 2

Input 1

Observer sees coach’s motion

Actor (charged head) patient action

Blend

I coach’s motion see Actor (charged head) patient action

Figure 7.7 Blend-structure model showing a failure of basic syntax

observed would be an object. Accordingly, a common SVO frame is required to express this in English. This can be expressed as ‘agent’ (the observer), ‘action’ (observe) and ‘patient’ (the observed). However the connectors again fail because the speaker has inherited an SOV structure from his native Korean. The failure is illustrated in the blendstructure shown in Figure 7.7. Clearly, also, a given learner will have a given state of metasyntactic and metalexical knowledge at their disposal. In this case, they may subsequently modify their output in a process that might unfold according to Figure 7.8. In this figure the left-hand blend between an agent, action, patient model and its realisation as an SOV construction produces an incorrect SOV sentence. However, the speaker, aware of their status as a learner, produces the left-hand blend between their metasyntactic model of the L2 and the L1. The failure to achieve a match between these structures produces a correct SVO blend. This corrects the SOV utterance in the third and final blend.

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L2 AAP

L1 SOV

L2 SVO

IL SOV

L1 SVO

MLM SVO

IL2 SVO AAP = Agent, action, patient MLM = Metalinguistic model Figure 7.8 Blend-structure model of language learning: modifying interlanguage with metasyntax

How a CBT model can account for language learning This CBT model of language learning is at the stage of suggestion only. However, it can account for the core features of the process that I outlined at the beginning, and I will now restate these features and summarise how the model accounts for them: 1 The use of implicit and explicit knowledge in combination. I have shown how implicit and explicit knowledge can be used in conjunction through blends with multiple inputs involving both a metalinguistic model and schematisations or proceduralised knowledge from both the L1 and the L2. 2 The proceduralisation of explicit knowledge (Ellis, 1990). Models that treat proceduralised language knowledge as separate from knowledge that has been naturally acquired cannot provide a proper basis for the separation of the modes of input that they assume. They cannot offer a sensible account of how the differentiated types of knowledge are used in combination as when a learner engages in constant selfcorrection, then manages to proceduralise the item in question. Blend-structure models can show how explicit knowledge can rework knowledge that is intuitive or explicit. In the process of schematisation the model also accounts for how some knowledge forms are subject to ongoing L1 interference, and others are rapidly proceduralised. The model explains the oscillation between reflexive mastery and the

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3

4

5

6

stumbling of overmonitored usage that characterises the development of second-language knowledge. Learners make use of their L1 in order to acquire the L2. A knowledge of an L1 can impede the mastery of the L2. A blend-structure model gives a strong account of how the L1 is used and not used to learn the L2. The L2 is not only treated as an analogue of the L1, but also as a series of schemas that have the capacity for self-representation. This knowledge of the L1 is extensible to the L2 through a blend process. Some of these extensions fail and some succeed. A first language furnishes the learner with strategies through which to consider how they are building the second. Because our learning goal, language, has been naturally evolved, this does not imply that the strategies used to reach it should be solely natural and unconscious also. Language provides us with the means to think about language. To deny this is to limit our semiotic capability. A first language allows us an opportunity consciously to represent the meanings of a second. To deny ourselves this semiotic opportunity is to deny ourselves the possibilities that language affords us. Learners are able to combine sometimes impoverished and incomplete episodes of second-language input in order to create a larger model of the L2. As an account of metaphor-making, CBT provides a clear account of linguistic creativity and the use of known principles to generate unknown forms. The critical age hypothesis (why younger learners achieve a better result) and why very young learners will lose language rapidly (attrition). A theory where the retention of language knowledge is based on schematisation has no trouble in accommodating the higher plasticity that gives younger learners greater long-term success but promotes rapid attrition when they are removed from the L2 environment. It also explains how L1 knowledge can interfere in L2 learning among adults. The model is of an intuitive process that can later be put to conscious use. The evidence for a natural order of syntax acquisition (Ellis, 1990). If natural orders exist, they lie somewhat outside the province of this model; they neither validate nor invalidate it. Natural orders can be explained by cognitivist arguments. One such argument necessitates a view of a language as subject to evolutionary pressures. Under such pressure it will take on the characteristics of a complex organism, adapting itself to the minds of its learners in order to survive (Deacon, 1997). Although a language will contain the needless complexities, blind-alleys and redundancies of any complicated evolving

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system, it will only survive if it can be easily passed down among a community of users. A language’s survival can only be assured by how it can attune itself to human cognition. A natural order could constitute one of the cognitive hooks that ensure learnability. More specifically, the order could be reexamined through the cognitive interpretation of grammar. Accordingly, structures that locate more obviously within core sets of physical interactions between objects or between people and the world may be acquired before those that do not. The model is based upon the schematisation of language constructions that operate at different levels of generality, and these levels are determined by how far category meanings govern the way in which an utterance can or cannot be constructed. The reference to imageschema expresses how a failure to understand the construction of a category in a target language and culture will result in a failure to understand how that category may or may not be extended within that target linguistic context. 7 The unstable and unpredictable nature of a process that is a response to an almost infinite variety of individual and environmental constraints. CBT supposes similar interactions occurring between very different features with different degrees of success. It allows for different degrees of biological receptivity to second-language input, enabling some to make much of impoverished language data and others to make little of a rich supply of the same. Degrees of variation can occur in: ● ●

● ● ●

the ease with which learners’ schematise input; the ease with which they can deploy blend processes (their linguistic creativity); the degree to which blends are subject to conscious control; the state of their metalinguistic knowledge; and the ability to make metalinguistic knowledge available to the linguistic blend.

All of these variable factors will be subject to others that are outside the province of the model. For example, one must consider the possibility of differences in the quality of auditory input fed into the mind. There is also the almost infinite scope for variation within the language learning context, not to mention the different degrees of learner receptivity and motivation.

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A blend-structure model of language learning: understanding and correcting student errors In suggesting a CBT model of language learning, I have looked at how this can be supported by the nature of student errors. I now want to look more closely at errors while turning back to my pedagogical theme and showing how an understanding of the nature of metaphor can advance our analysis of errors in a way that suggests strategies for correction. Using the blend-structure model developed above, my approach will take as its starting point the assumption that there are three sources of error which might occur because: 1 The input, I1, is still weighted towards the conceptualisations of the TL. 2 The conceptualisation of the TL in the input, I1, and the knowledge of forms through which it is realised and the input of the I2, produce a blend that does not accord with the norms schematised by native speakers of the TL. In other words, the speaker makes a generalisation which is not supported by the manner in which the TL is normally used. 3 The blend of the I1, the context through which some TL feature is conceptualised, and the I2, the context of use, does not accord with the norms schematised by native speakers of the TL. These factors will also operate in combination and are often difficult to prize apart. I will now examine how these insights can be applied. I begin with one example that many native speakers might consider successful: 92

As you know blood circulates the means of life.

There are three errors in this sentence, but none of them obscures its meaning. First is the use of ‘as you know’. The student is attempting an analogy to support a written academic argument. The use of ‘you’ is inappropriate to this register. Typically, the register treats the reader in one of two ways: 1 Inclusively, with the first person plural, as someone whose identity is blended with that of the author so that they become party to the author’s unfolding of an opinion. 2 Exclusively, often with the passive, as someone whose identity is ignored by a narrative that fosters the illusion of unfolding itself, like the events to which it is witness.

212 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Generic space

Input 2

Engaging a formal academic reader to promote textual coherence

Textual cohesion, linkage of authorial voice

Blend

Input 1

Interlanguage Input, chunked: ‘as you know’ to engage an interlocutor

‘As you know’ in a formal academic essay

Figure 7.9 Blend structure language learning: cueing the wrong register

A chunked phrase (as you know) probably acquired in conversation to engage an interlocutor has been blended with the context of engaging a formal academic reader. The blend product is an overgeneralisation of the phrase, which is not uncommon among L2 users because of the lack of an appropriate lexicon (see Figure 7.9). An error-correction strategy would emphasise the metaphors preferred by English academic discourse: reader inclusion or reader exclusion as opposed to direct reader address. Students can be encouraged to schematise these blends by converting parts of spoken lectures into written essays or paragraphs. This can be illustrated as the author leading the reader into the text, or as standing outside of it with them and gaping at it as if at an astonishing billboard. The second, very marginal error concerns the transitivity of ‘circulate’. It is also a clear instance of how grammatical and lexical errors cannot always be prised apart. ‘Blood circulating the means of life’ might be acceptable in Romance languages, and it is almost acceptable in English. We can circulate newspapers, and the heart can circulate blood. However, ‘blood’ perhaps forces an intransitive interpretation of the verb. Blood ‘circulates’ and carries with it ‘the means to sustain life’. The error could either be the overgeneralisation of a correct interlanguage form (from

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Generic space

Life: the circulation of oxygenated blood Input 2

Blood passing round the means of life

Input 1

Romance form (circular-transitive) Blend

Circulating the means of life

Figure 7.10 transitivity

Blend structure errors: how the meaning of ‘blood’ governs

‘circulate the paper’ to ‘circulate the means of life’); it could also be a blend between an acceptable Romance construction from the speaker’s L1 (Spanish) and an English cognate that cannot be used in the same way (Figure 7.10). This could be corrected through an emphasis that as a pump, the heart circulates blood and as a liquid, blood carries oxygenated cells from the lungs through the body. A clearer instance of a blend overgeneralising an interlanguage input is given in 93: 93

Yes I need to precise this analysis. (author’s data)

This originates from a student with L1 Arabic, L2 English and no other language. Arabic does not allow this form, unlike some other languages such as French, which have extended the adjective function to a verb, as in ‘preciser’. Therefore, the error is not a result of transfer. English is tolerant of the use of adjectives as verbs, as in ‘calm the crowd’ or ‘blank out the screen’. The student has made a generalisation on the assumption that ‘precise’ can be treated with equal flexibility. A strategy here is to

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inform the student that this word will not support a verb form, while reminding them that many will. The blend model allows for how the different causes of errors may intertwine to produce any given instance and cannot always be separated out. However, there are also cases where the way we schematise a construction may have been correctly grasped at a macro level but not at the level of the context to which it is applied. Such errors are at the end of the learner’s approach path. For example: 94 to prevent it (a small incident) from coming up to a large one. (author’s data: BBC News, 12 June 2000) Like this speaker’s native Dutch, English commonly exploits the universal schematisation of ‘up is more’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) as in ‘we must raise productivity’. This schema, however, may use different landmarks. The landmark refers to the conceptual position that the speaker takes in respect of their utterance. Thus if we say ‘it is coming up’ we assume that we are ‘up’ and the rising object is down. This is inappropriate for the utterance. If the problem ‘grows’ we would imagine it as spreading above us like a tree with an unwelcome shade or as an explosion throwing its debris into the sky above (the problem blew up). If the problem came up to us we would already be suffering from its ill-effects. Nonsensically, we would be at the problematic level that the problem has not yet attained. Another phrase might not use ‘up is more’, but ‘further is more’, or a horizontal plane in other words. Here the realisation would be ‘developing into’ which presupposes movement along a horizontal axis towards a ‘state as location’ and perhaps away from (de) another. Phrase 94 also shows the poor construction of the category, ‘a problem’; this is not perceived as a fixed entity that goes up, or heap of other entities that piles up, it is something which is more organic and prone to ‘grow’ or to ‘increase’. However, English does employ the ‘up is more’ schema in this instance as in ‘the problem blew up into something larger’, or the lexically different but schematically similar ‘the problem grew into something larger’. In this last case, one can see how the use of the ‘up is more’ overlaps the biological assumption that ‘growth is increase’. To correct the error, one might thus illustrate the absurdity of things rising towards an already suspended speaker as in Figure 7.11. ‘Grow into’ and ‘blow into’ would also be marked as motion on a vertical plain with the speaker landmarking the beginning point rather than the arrival point of the growth. One could do an alternative illustration for ‘develop into’ as motion on a horizontal plane that marks how the problem develops away from the speaker.

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into something bigger

The problem comes up into something bigger

grows The problem into something bigger blows up

The problem Figure 7.11 Blend structure approach to errors: right image schema, wrong category

Our discussion of landmarks again draws attention to how much conceptualisation is based upon spatial metaphor. Consider sentence 95, for example: 95

I started play golf twenty years ago. (author’s data)

This sentence omits the preposition ‘to’ with the verb infinitive. Because of the speaker’s basic language level, it may be that this is as a result of mother tongue interference rather than the common confusion of begin/start ⫹ verb ⫹ ing with the infinitive, begin/start ⫹ to verb (infinitive). If it is an L1 interference, the speaker may have no knowledge of these alternative English forms. Yet the error may become more interesting if, instead of accepting that it occurs because the L1 and L2 grammar are different, one first asks why the infinitive in English is constructed with a preposition indicating spatial motion ‘to’. It could be that the infinitive is actually realising the ‘event as location’, identified by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). According to this view, the verb, as representing an event or action, is constructed as a place towards which we are moving. Also, there is a more fundamental ‘time-is-space’ schema at play. This metaphor means that we express our temporal movement towards an action as a spatial one. Therefore, it may be possible to see the error in 95 as arising from a failure to select the appropriate schema out of which

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I

began

to play

I

started

to play

I

wanted

to play

I

thought

to play

I

hoped

to play but I couldn’t

Figure 7.12 Using the event-is-location metaphor to help students construct and use English infinitives

the English ‘to ⫹ infinitive’ is constructed. It may be that the learner would have been helped towards an early and appropriate schematisation if they had used a sheet such as the one given in Figure 7.12. Alternatively, this could be handed to students who make such errors so that they may collect examples around the conceptual metaphor from which they arise. The motion towards is indicated by the top verb phrase, which also has a metaphorical sense and expresses causation through the same ‘path’ metaphor. The verbs below are indicated more strongly as an approach towards an action. All the verb phrases can refer to an interrupted approach but the tendency might be stronger in the last two. This is why I have inserted an arrow to show the possibility of a diversion before the arrival. The verb-state has been taken out of bold to indicate that it is a hypothetical destination. The above analysis points out how a correct application of ‘the path’ image schema could help a lower level student grasp the construction of the ‘to ⫹ verb (infinitive)’ in English. However, prepositional errors with the infinitive would generally be considered elementary and are probably far from being the most common since the infinitive is often learnt as a ‘to ⫹ verb’ construction. I will now look at a more advanced error involving prepositions or particles. Consider sentence 96, below: 96 The company has to expect market growth to face with the competition. (author’s data)

The Metaphor of Learning 217

‘With’ normally connotes spatial proximity and by extension possession and belonging, as in sentence 97: 97

The woman with a crocodile handbag.

‘With’ also had the earlier meaning of ‘against’ (Lindstromberg, 1997). However, the closeness of these meanings may derive from the fact that they both indicate spatial contact as can be seen from a phrase such as ‘the ladder against the wall’. ‘Face’ and ‘face up to’ are both built out of the primary expression of direction through body parts. ‘Turning the back’ signifies retreat, running away, and hence by extension ignoring what is happening. ‘Facing’ has the meaning of looking forwards (in the direction of the face) and hence of dealing with issues as opposed to running away from them. ‘Facing up with’ shows a blend of the confrontational ‘face up to’ with ‘keeping up with’ or ‘keeping pace with’, or the idea of against, as in ‘fighting with’, instead of the staring down of an opponent that precedes a conflict. The manner in which a correct and confrontational schematisation will find expression in the appropriate phrasal verb can be shown as in Figure 7.13. As a contrast, ‘keep up with’ and ‘keep pace with’ can be shown as in Figure 7.14. Therefore, what has occurred here is that the student has constructed the notion of ‘face’ out of a schema of spatial proximity to the issue (or its reification) that must be confronted. This may be because they have ‘chunked’ ‘up with’, and partially schematised it. But in fact the construction does not simply imply proximity but movement towards the same because moving closer to somebody implies confrontation. Further, a hidden or buried ‘face’ implies a failure to confront. Hence the face must be brought ‘up’. The correction emphasises the idea of that movement. More effective than this diagram of confrontation might be the physical enactment of the same in the classroom.

up

Face

to

it

Figure 7.13 Image schematic approaches to correction: ‘keep up with’

218 Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Up is an end point

up

Keep Figure 7.14 Image schematic approaches to correction: schematising ‘up with’ versus ‘up to’

Hitherto I have biased this analysis towards ‘near-miss’ errors. However, the same framework will also expose the mechanisms behind more extreme cases of failure. Sentence 97 is from a Chinese (Mandarin) speaker who is writing why mothers should go out to work: 97 And the mother stay at home will enough message from outside, from society, then the mothers can’t give enough knowlarge to they children and the children will very spoil from mothers. First there is a clear blend principle between the very simple morphology of Chinese and the more complicated structures of English. There are no subject–verb agreements (mother study); there is no distinction between pronouns and their possessive forms (they children); and no morphemes to indicate aspect (will very spoil from mother). Nonetheless, the student’s use of lexis conveys an approximate meaning. They have also grasped the principle of nouns being preceded by articles. However, there is not much evidence for a principled differentiation between definite and indefinite articles. In short, there is a clear blend principle between a language that has two articles and one that has none, with a kind of single form output as if there is an overload to the definite form. Another interesting feature concerns discourse structure and anaphora. Pronouns are seldom used in Chinese to carry reference through a text. Cohesion is often carried by the elision of the succeeding subjects (Baker, 1992). In this case, subjects are not elided but reference is

The Metaphor of Learning 219

carried by repetition (mother study, mother stay). The English need for a copula has also imposed itself, but the auxiliary ‘will’ has been substituted. This might be a product of the partial schematisation of a ‘will’ construction as in a conditional of the type ‘what will happen if the mother stays at home’. An interesting but plausible lexical overgeneralisation is the use of ‘message’ for ‘information’. A failure to grasp aspect (spoil from the mother) forces the schematisation of spoiling as an excessive gift, ‘from the mother’ to the child. Also noteworthy is the phonological blend, taking its input (I1) from the English phoneme ‘e’ and its I2 from a Chinese perception of the phoneme as ‘ar’, giving ‘knowlarge’. ‘Knowlarge’ is itself an orthographic blend steered by the phonological one, as between the correct ‘know’ and the incorrect ‘large’. Such sentences reveal the complicated and elaborate nature of the blend processes that will occur, even at quite an advanced stage of language learning.

Conclusions This chapter has consolidated some of the larger claims of this book about how the processes through which meaning in language has been built may be replicated in the processes through which language can be learnt. It does this first by examining some of the current issues in second-language acquisition theory. The broad conclusion was that such theories are for the most part unsustainable because they are based on a dichotomy between learning and acquisition that is not open to disproof. It then showed how these theories are in conflict with the linguistic position from which they claim support. The chapter puts forward a model of how that blend process could drive language learning, taking the straightforward view that learning advances through a blend process. Blends occur between: 1 the TL input and the schemas of the L1; 2 the partial schematisations of the interlanguage and those of the L1; and 3 the partial schematisations of the interlanguage and the TL input. These blends construct the interlanguage and the fact that they are ongoing creates its defining instability. The chapter has looked at how we can find evidence for these processes in student errors. For example, type 1 can be found in straightforward phonological errors, with accented speech being their

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inevitable result. Type 2 could be illustrated by a construction such as ‘one problem coming up into a larger one’; the L1 has provided a correct schema for this context (up is more) but the interlanguage has furnished an incorrect landmark (coming up to). Type 3 is in effect difficult to distinguish from type 2 because this distinction hinges on knowing the state of the interlanguage at any one time as well as the source of a given error. James (1998) suggested broadly that there are three approaches to student errors. The first is to perceive them as revealing how the student’s mother tongue differs from the target language (TL). The second is to describe the errors in terms of their failure to realise the forms of the TL. The third is to view them not as failings at all but as indicative of a type of language knowledge that the student has constructed, of their interlanguage, in other words. I have added a fourth approach. My interest has been to show how far the student has internalised the conceptual basis of the target language and how far they have made it reflect the one that has been given them by their L1. Yet my larger concern is pedagogical. A learning theory that is without specifiable pedagogical implications is of little interest, and the larger pedagogical implications are contained within the preceding chapters of this book. They are also revealed by my consideration of how learning materials can correct students by helping them to construct a correct conceptualisation when they produce one that is patently wrong.

8 Conclusions

Our understanding of metaphor should change our view of how we think about the world and how those modes of thought affect the categories and constructions that language employs. This book has begun the larger enquiry into how this knowledge of metaphor may affect language teaching and learning. It began by thinking about it from the perspective of classroom practice, and then suggested how one might build the model of learning to which that practice could appeal. Thus far, the enquiry has been at the level of the methods and not of the broader specification of methodological principles which those methods would support and out of which one could produce a wider spectrum of classroom possibilities. However, accumulated methods should be indicative of a methodology and I will now set out its broader principles as follows: 1 2 3 4

Cognitive not social relevance. Cultural empathy. Affective is effective. A kinaesthetic pedagogy: understanding the physical basis of meaning. 5 A construction-based pedagogy: exploiting the spatial construction of meaning. 6 A participatory pedagogy.

Cognitive not social relevance Our new understanding of the nature of meaning construction can allow teachers to think less about social relevance and more about how pedagogy can appeal to the facets of mind that underlie language. Social relevance is ephemeral unless it is perceived as a state of interaction with 221

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the mind that will carry language through time. We can develop this sense of a Vygotskian (1978) dynamic entailing mind as a social construct and society as a mental one. Teachers should make their students aware that they are not teaching language in order to satisfy the predicted social functions of their students. The classroom can address the social nature of language by studying analogous contexts, unfolding the same as a concertina of zones of potential use, then fine-tuning the language that must be used in order to account for the linguistic difference in likeness that every communicative situation requires. The pedagogical objective is a knowledge of language that understands its scope for development according to the requirements that are imposed upon it. This can never be more true than in our school systems. It is difficult to imagine how we can identify appropriate contexts as essential to a younger or teenage learner’s life when they themselves will refashion such zones of use. A needs-based and high-surrender-value language curriculum assumes a static relationship between the school and the world outside. It ignores how the learner’s mind will always be in a state of dynamic interaction with several of these broader contexts at the same time. Students carry knowledge back and forth between the classroom and their out-of-school life, and their presence in one context will itself alter its nature according to the knowledge they bring and the personality which that knowledge will partly construct and by which it is itself constructed. Instrumental language learning diverts pedagogy from knowledge creation to knowledge application. Redressing that balance is not to advocate a return to the classical curriculum with its emphasis upon a language as the reified knowledge that the student learns about but never learns. The appropriate metaphor is of language as an organism (Deacon, 1997) whose adaptive and extensible nature should not trigger a learner quest for mastery so much as symbiotic acquiescence. Such acquiescence is to the conceptual-hierarchies and category models or Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs) from which the target language unfolds meanings.

Cultural empathy To question an approach whose objective is to dole out parcels of precontextualised language is not to extricate language from the cultural context by which it is partially constructed. I have examined how cognitivist views of metaphor suggest a mechanism through which a culture constructs a language. The view is that ‘we grow up experiencing

Conclusions 223

different segments of reality with groups of individuals whose natures vary and who engage in radically different types of activity’. People everywhere share some early-life experiences; ‘however, our perception of these will sometimes be through the filter of different cultures. The fact of growing up in a different culture may also alter the nature of the experience itself’ (Holme, 2002). These differences mean that we may conceptualise even universal experience through different metaphors (Lakoff, 1987; Gibbs, 1994) and differently extended categories. In a much-cited observation, Bakhtin (1981) noted how language divides between ‘single-voiced’ and ‘double-voiced utterances’. The historical meanings of single-voiced utterances ‘are invisible to the speaker’ (Hall, 2002: 15); they set down an unequivocal presence in the linguistic landscape, meaning what they mean. Double-voiced utterances posit a certain speaker licence, allowing them to use the terms ‘passively’, as others have used them, or ‘actively’ in order to express how we may position ourselves differently towards what we want to express. This analysis would frame our cultural objectives as follows: 1 To make some invisible meanings visible, bringing them out of their historical obscurity in order to show why they are constructed as they are. The objective is to help the learner gain a conscious hold on such differences of construction. The learner can also secure the meanings of their first language by understanding them more clearly from the perspective of the target language (TL). At the same time they can grapple with the different meanings that the TL presents. 2 To help them fashion active double-voiced utterances. Language knowledge should not be a prison of schematised meanings, but a pathway to greater expressiveness. Metaphor affords students the means to tailor inherited meanings to their own needs. 3 Language learning is cultural engagement not cultural submission. The individual who uses English as a second language with fuller understanding of its cultural meaning does not have to submit to the cultural values of the English-speaking world. They can enter into an active engagement with those meanings so as to make them serve their own cultural needs.

Affective is effective Much of this enquiry has focused upon finding a new rationalisation for well-recognised principles. Few teachers would dispute the benefits of an affective pedagogy. Traditionally this can be at the superficial level of simply allowing learners to direct lesson content away from a hypothetical

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framework of needs to what interests them. It can also entail a risk-taking pedagogy that tries to foster a deeper and more emotional engagement between learners and language. Metaphor suggests itself as one of language’s affective hooks. On the one hand it suggests the means through which learner’s can steer language towards the representation of their own ‘felt’ experiences; on the other hand it posits a mechanism that may break down category boundaries sending meanings off on a search for the networks of associations that will seek a coherent and engaged expression. Metaphors also give lexis an affective significance that may increase the chances of its being remembered and reused.

A kinaesthetic pedagogy: understanding the physical basis of meaning I have described how abstract meaning, with which we should include grammatical meaning, is conceptualised through metaphors born of embodied experience (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). A less explored method would involve making new linguistic meanings explicable and memorable by trying to reset them in the types of embodied experience from which they have evolved. An example was the spatial representation of time through the spatial division of the classroom and students’ movements in that divided space. Other methodologies have also made use of this kinaesthetic principle. TPR (total physical response), for example, is a method where students learn language by responding to physical instructions with physical movement. The method is based on a concept of acquisition and the silent period that I have found flawed. However, if it has enjoyed some success it may be because of how it returns language to the physical experience form which it has evolved. Teachers need to think more how they can help students to take physical possession of language and situate themselves physically in the schemas from which it has evolved. This is not just a case of moving in response to commands, it can be a case of using bodily movement to mark out the spatial construction of language – walking towards a metaphorical future, for example, or turning back into the past.

A construction-based pedagogy: exploiting the spatial construction of meaning A considerable amount of language teaching time is dedicated to helping students to express temporal relations. This is partly because

Conclusions 225

Although I’d finished the main course

Past perfect

I was still eating

When you came

Past continuous

But now I’ve finished

Present perfect Past simple

Figure 8.1 A time-line showing the English tense system

methods that treat grammar as a central concern will inevitably focus on tense. Time must be conceptualised either as space or as an entity in the same. Teachers intuit this when they illustrate some aspects of the English past-tense system through a time-line such as the one shown in Figure 8.1. Yet these lines typify a structuralist approach to grammar. The tenses are set in examples of often dubious relevance, and the structure is treated as if it can be easily generalised as an organisational principle to other, parallel contexts. Generalisation, here, supposes abstraction, or the removal of some principle or rule. In this move through the ether of abstraction some aspect of the structure may be lost. A different approach would be to decide that this type of diagram is not just a metaphor of an organisational principle that may be incorrectly applied to language. Teachers can treat the diagram as what I would call a cluster principle, writing onto it prototypical examples of use, like the text shown in Figure 8.1, then expecting that students will also write up their own examples. Time-lines are not just instruments for showing the way in which a language conceptualises time, they are an exploratory tool that can, for example, help individuals and communities shape a narrative of the key events that will help them explore why they live as they do with the problems that they have. In the language class, the time-line can organise the anecdotes with which students construct their past experiences of learning or some other area of experience. It could be a wall-chart onto which they write these vignettes; these may then become the prototypes around which the tense is schematised or the extending radii of the category that is being formed. The pedagogical principle just outlined is that students are unlikely to respond well to a grammar that is presented as a series of abstract regulatory principles. Grammar must be embedded into the lexis whose

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meanings it governs and which will govern it. Some syntactic principles such as basic English subject–verb–object word order are acquired quite easily, which may be because they are easily embedded into sequences of everyday physical actions. Others, such as tense, pose greater problems and this may be because their use is seen as governed by complicated principles that are difficult to apply. Clearly, the more general a grammatical rule, the more productive it will be. But it may be that language users actually deal in lower-order generalisations building them around the governance of certain meanings. For example, if a structure such as ‘I haven’t done it yet’ or ‘I’ve never been there’ will be dominant in the use of the present-perfect, this may not be because ‘never’ and ‘yet’ are easily identified as triggers for a tense that often expresses uncompleted actions. It may be because these phrases are constructions that can be schematised. It may be that teachers who see students master the construction in a restricted context should now think more about what I have called ‘concertinas’ of interrelated contexts. These are the situations that furnish the lexical sets into which a given construction can be embedded and out of which it can be generalised towards other plausible instances of use.

A participatory pedagogy If we accept the cognitivist thesis that is being put forward, we can no longer retain the idea of an isolated language processor in the mind. This makes linguistic and input-based positions on second-language acquisition difficult to sustain. Cognition and learning are facets of each other. The interference of cognition in language must therefore make it unlikely that language can ever be acquired without the support of cognitive processes. As this interference becomes open to conscious manipulation and control, then it will become a facet of what is normally called learning. This is not to deny a role to unconscious or unfocused learning in language or any other area. However, it is to assert that linguistic input will not simply activate some dumb and purely reactive linguistic processor so much as a larger array of cognitive processes many of which the learner can analyse then consciously deploy. This is not in any way a statement that a stress on learning entails a return to some teacher-centred, translation-based class. Input-based approaches do have the merit of stressing the primacy of using the target language in the classroom. Target-language use is basic to good practice because it is only then that the student can obtain the linguistic data on which their cognitive strategies can operate. Languages are

Conclusions 227

systems whose survival is testament to our capacity to learn them through exposure. The use of the target language remained preeminent in my own classroom experimentation with the methods suggested by this approach. Nonetheless, I have observed in myself a drift away from the purely facilitative mode that may be presupposed by ‘strong’ communicative theory. In Scrivner’s (1996) ARC (Authentic, Restricted, Clarification) model teachers can sequence lessons between exposure to a given and unrestricted chunk of language (authentic) before homing in on a particular form (restricted) then assisting in a conscious identification of how it is constructed and used (clarification). Such a model makes a considerable concession to the need for input and for student processing of the same whether through natural and intuitive procedures or ones that are artificially structured and consciously triggered. But the current UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate) CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) still makes rigid prescriptions about reducing TTT (teacher talking time). By these tokens, a language class is often rated as successful if it runs with only occasional teacher involvement, treating the teacher as a dictionary or grammar book to be consulted on the odd occasion when communication breaks down. The teacher’s work is supposedly done outside class or in the opening and closing stages of the activity. In the facilitative model, the teacher steps back from the class and hands it over to a controlling plan. The techniques tried here suggested a more dialogic process, with a more central role for the teacher. Their presence cajoles the class this way and that, sometimes negotiating a change of direction and at other times calling a halt to explore an unexpected point. I would call this pedagogy more participatory than facilitative. In the mode of the literacy educator, Paulo Freire, (for example 1974) a participatory style entails that the teacher is neither follower nor guide. It supposes that students and teachers are partners in an analogical enterprise, opening new directions for each other and remaining alert not to the dangers of digression but to the possibilities of the same. There is a suggestion of experimentation in digression and an acknowledgement by all that some of the newly discovered alleys will be blind. Teachers may be too well conditioned to treat successful lessons as time that passes according to a planned and therefore seamless passage from one phase to the next. However, time may be more memorable when the passages are turbulent and the class feels challenged by a sudden moment of opacity in the lesson’s structure.

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Like many trainers, I tell new teachers that they must learn to ‘think on the run’ and to be able to find rapid explanations for the unpredictable language items that a given class will produce. I would now stress how participatory teaching is about being alert to the opportunities that arise from getting lost on a detour. It means being able to help the class orient themselves amidst the strange topography that such detours can suddenly reveal. The forging of a conscious link between the metaphors through which a language is conceptualised and through which language can be explained has yielded a further quite simple insight. This is that, in doing this study, I became more aware both of my own metaphormaking processes and of those implicit in the language I have been teaching. My conclusion is a very general exhortation to teachers to think metaphorically. Such modes of thought enable them to explain what previously seemed to be inexplicable, to suggest why ‘face up to’ has acquired the meaning that it has, for example. Thinking metaphorically can also stimulate a search for meaningful forms of explanation and illustration, looking at how the division of classroom space can be mapped onto a language’s construction of time or at how emptying a box of its intellectual contents can illustrate the idea of deduction. When discussing this broader consequence of a metaphor-based approach with both students and colleagues, it becomes clear that this very general mode of analysis can lead to successful pedagogical events. Thinking metaphorically can enter into how we design materials. CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) materials, for example, can demonstrate the metaphorical structure of language by using their potential for diagrammatic animation. But, in essence, this examination of the role of metaphor is largely without resource implications. The objective is the use of such universals as space and our physical existence within it in order to appeal to the cognition with which we are all equipped. Such a principle posits a resource-light approach that can be adopted by teachers everywhere.

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Index Abstract meaning, teaching the metaphorical nature of 124–6 Actor (grammatical function) 68, 70, 76 Addison, J. 35–6 Affect 44, 46, 48, 58, 92, 221, 223–4 Allegory 98–100, 118 Alps (Alpes) 36 Alverson, J. 25 Analogy 17, 21, 100–19, 129, 161, 172, 188, 211; analogous contexts 88 Anchoring 47 Animal Farm 98 Ankersmit, R. 46 Anyon, J. 53 Arabic language 60 Argument structures, horizontal argument, vertical argument 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 134 Argument is war metaphor 11, 131 Aristotle 1, 18, 79, 138 Attributes (grammatical function) 70 Author-is-a-guide metaphor 135 Ayamaran language 25 Baker, C. 218 Bakhtin, 223 Balance, image schema 23 Barbera, M. L. 13 Barrier metaphor 137 Basho 137 Behaviourist, behaviourism 120, 122, 178 Belleza, F. 12 Black, M. 3, 29 Blending see cognitive blend theory (CBT) Block, D. 12–13 Body-is-a-container metaphor 24, 25 Body-is-a-nation state metaphor 13 Boers, F. 133, 156, 157 Boundedness 167

Brooke-Rose, C. 59 Brown, A. 86, 104 Brown, C. 186 Bryant, P. 263 Buckalew, L.W. 47 Burt, M. 186 Business-is-war metaphor Byram, M. 37, 57

11, 130

Cameron, L. 59 Cartesian method 2 Cash-is-liquid metaphor 134–5 Category 30–40, 56, 194–5, 200, 201, 206, 210, 222 Causation metaphors 70–8, 138–43, 216, 218–19 Centaur 22 Chinese language, Mandarin 25, 60 Chomsky, N. 7, 95, 186–7, 191, 192 Circulation, of the blood 103–4; of money 107 Class inclusion 32, 89 Cluster principle 225 Co-ordinate structure constraint 151 Cognitive approaches to metaphor processing 9–27 Cognitive blend theory (CBT) 9, 18–22, 24, 102–3, 113, 181, 197–219 Cognitive disembedding 86 Cohesion in text 137–8 Cohesive device, 65, 76, 130 Collocation 123, 140, 154 Communication-is-a-conduit metaphor 10, 135 Communicative methodology, communicative language teaching (CLT) 121, 129, 161 Comparative theory of metaphor 1 Competence (linguistic) 7, 45, 48, 95, 180; metaphorical competence 94–5; strategic competence 40 237

238 Index Conceptual metaphor 9, 10, 46, 82, 133, 134, 155, 166 Conceptualisation 12, 22–4, 25, 28, 123, 148, 200 Congruent language 67, 68–9, 70, 72, 74 Connotative (use of metaphor) 44 Construal 152–3 Construction grammar 153–5 Container metaphor 25, 140 Contiguity 33–4 Cook, G. 96, 121, 183 Cook, V. 122, 186, 187 Cooper, D. 1, 3, 8, 14, 82 Co-operative maxims, Grice’s 7 Copula metaphor 29, 59–60 Corpus linguistics 154 Counterfactuals 19 Cox, M. 45 Critical age hypothesis 197, 203 Critical literacy 52 Croft, W. 150, 153 Cruse, D. A. 150, 153 Culture, and category construction, 34, 37–9, 40, 200, 210; culture and disease 13; culture and language teaching 57, 87, 126–7, 222–3; culture and metaphor 24–5, 66, 148, 200 Dani language 30 Davidson, D. 5, 79 Deacon, T. 122, 192, 209, 222 Dead metaphor 3, 45 Decoding idioms 147 Definite article 168–72, 218 Delacroix, E. 50–1 Demonstrative 169, 171 Derrida, J. 1, 5, 12, 200 Descartes, R. 2 Domain, source and target domain 17–18, 60, 61, 63, 81, 82, 83, 98, 101, 103, 118, 129 Diachronic study of language 26–7, 126–9, 166, 169 Dixon Hunt, J. 36 Double-voiced utterances 223 Downing, A. 69 Drew, P. 66

Dudley-Evans, T. 130, 135 Dulay, H. 186 Elgin, C. Z. 14, 16, 73 Ellis, R. 121, 196–7, 208, 209 Embodied mind, theory of 9, 23 Emotions, metaphors of 25–35, 50–1, 82–3 Empiricism 2 Endoxa 4 English for Specific Purposes (ESP) 130 Epiphenomenon 7 Esartes-Sarries, V. 57 Essay writing 109–17 Essay-is-a-building metaphor 115–16 Essay-is-a-dialogue metaphor 116 Ethnomethodology 57 Etymological enigma 127 Event-is-location metaphor 216 Explicit knowledge 184–5 Family resemblances, theory of 31 Fauconnier, G. 17–21, 84–6, 96, 199, 205–6 Feak, C. 114 Feature sharing 83 Field, semantic field 17 Fillmore, C.J. 147, 150, 153 Financial Times 138 First World War 18 Flanders 18 Fodor, J. 189–90 Fox, A. 26 Freire, P. 227 French, going-to future 27 French, grammaticalisation of the future tense 26 Functional flexibility 86 Galileo, Galilean 101, 107 Generative grammar 150–2 Generic space; the blend structure model 20 Genius, The Genius of the Place 20 Genre 79; genre-based approaches to writing instruction 111–15 Gentner, D. 80, 101, 103 Gibbs, R. 8–9, 17, 24, 35, 82, 95, 96, 98, 196, 223

Index 239 Glucksberg, S. 34, 66, 82, 96 Goatly, A. 8, 15, 78, 89, 114, 130, 148 Goldsmith, J. 151 Goodman, N. 80 Gordon, D. 47 Gormenghast 61, 78 Goswami, U. C. 203 Goya, F. 16 Grady, J. 23, 82, 200 Grammar 9–10, 25–7, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 87, 116, 120, 121, 150–79, 196, 198, 205–7, 215, 225–6, 227 Grammatical metaphor 57–78 Grammaticalisation 26–7, 172, 173, 178 Gregg, K. 23, 190 Grice, H. P. 7 Guided fantasies 169 Halliday, M. 68, 71, 73, 96, 169 Haraway, D. 13 Hasan, R. 169 Hatch, E. 17 Hawkins, B. W. 156 Hegel, F. 2 Heine, B. 26, 27, 140, 156, 173 History, history-is-a-tree metaphor 109 Holme, R. 53, 91, 109, 117, 236 Holt, E. 66 Holyoak, J. 44, 101, 103, 109, 110 Hopper, P. 26 Horizontal argument structures 110–11, 115, 116 Hour-glass model of paragraph structure 114 Howatt, A. P. R. 121 Humanistic language teaching 44, 92–3 Hutchinson, T. 103 ‘i’ language 187, 188 Idealised cognitive models (ICMs) 34–5, 154, 222 Ideas-are-buildings metaphor 96–7 Idiom 15, 28, 43–4, 65, 129–30, 147–9, 150–1, 153–5, 191, 198; decoding idioms 147; maritime idiom 25

Illness, metaphors of 13 Image schemas 23, 27 Image schematic metaphor processing 9–10, 155 Immune system, metaphors of 13 Implicatures, Gricean 8 Implicit knowledge 184–5 Indefinite article 168–72, 218 Inference, in analogy 103, 110, 112, 118 Inflection 26 Inheritance, cognitive concept of 199 Instrumental language learning 222 Interactional theory of metaphor 4 Interlanguage 45, 197, 198, 199 Iraq, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait 13 Isomorphic 4, 63, 109–10, 118, 162 Jakobson, R. 5 James, C. 220 James, T. 47 Jeziorski, M. 80, 101, 103 Jin, L. 60 Johnson, M. 11–12, 17, 23, 24, 82, 83, 85, 95, 98, 131, 138–41, 151, 152, 162, 166, 191, 224 Jordens, P. 181 Kanpol, B. 53 Keysar, B. 66, 82 Khun, T. S. 47 Kinaesthetic 224 King, J. A. 81 Knowledge-is-sight metaphor 123, 133, 135, 136 Koestler, A. 84 Kövecses, Z. 34 Krashen, S. 121–2, 180, 182, 185, 186, 187, 190 Kress, G. 70 Lakoff, G. 11–12, 17, 23, 24, 25, 33, 56, 82, 83, 85, 96, 98, 131, 138–41, 147, 151, 152, 162, 166, 191, 199, 233, 224 Landmark 163, 164, 165, 166, 214 Landship metaphor, the battle tank as a blend 18–21

240 Index Langacker, R. 26, 74, 95, 152, 167, 191 Language as an organism metaphor 209–10 Language and Residence Abroad Project (LARA) 37 Latin, future of 26 Lawrence, D. H. 82 Layering 50 Lee, D. 152, 153 Lemke, J. L. 68 Lewis, N. 126 Lexical approach 123 Lexical metaphor 67 Lexicalisation 3 Lexicalised metaphor 3 Life-is-a-journey metaphor 10, 82 Lin, Mei Yi 112 Lindner, S. 156, 157, 159 Lindstromberg, S. 130, 156 Liquid-is-movement metaphor 130, 134 Literacy 36, 52, 70–1 Literal and metaphorical language 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14–17, 27, 32, 40, 42, 43, 48, 53, 60, 65, 66, 73, 78, 79, 80, 83, 89, 94, 99, 120, 145; literal similarity see similarity Literature teaching 53 Location-event-structure metaphor 138 Locative-subject metaphor 69 Locke, P. 69 Lockhart, C. 57 Low, G. D. 13, 94–5 Lozanov, G. 45 Lupton, D. 13 Macbeth, Shakespeare’s 53–6 MacCormac, E.R. 60 Mapping 9, 17–18, 82, 84, 129; counterpart mapping 113, 199, 202, 203; feature mapping 84; deep structure mapping 86; partial cross-space mapping 84 Marie-Celeste, the ghost-ship metaphor 70 Maritime metaphor 24–5 Markman, E. M. 200 Marshall, I. 72

Martin, E. 13 Marx, Karl 64–5 Matching (forming counterpart connections) 21 McLaughlin, B. 186, 190, 191 Meaning creation 28 Medicine, metaphors of 13 Mental predicator (grammatical function) 68 Mental space 18, 20, 21, 84 Meronymy 40, 133 Metadiscourse, metadiscoursal schema, 135 Metalanguage, 116; metalinguistic knowledge 160, 210; metalinguistic model 204–5, 208 Metaphonological awareness 203 Metaphor: adjective metaphors 62; adjunct metaphors 64–5; adjunct-to-locative-subject metaphor 69; adverb metaphors 63; copula metaphors 29, 59–60; sentential metaphors 65; synaesthetic metaphors 62; verb metaphors 60 Metaphorical competence 94–5 Metaphors of organisation 13, 57, 109 Metatext 13, 116, 123 Metonymy 33–5, 40, 49, 56, 120 Mind-maps 132 Mnemonic 2, 12, 134, 149, 171 Modality 69 Modals, modal verbs 69 Modelling (in neuro-linguistic programming) 47 Models 109–14, 118 Modularity 188, 189–90, 192 Monitor theory 185 Morgan, G. 13, 57, 109 Morgan, J. 99 Morpheme studies, natural order 186 Moskowitz, G. 44, 45, 169 Mother tongue (MT) teaching 36 Movement (in syntax) 151–2 Moves, move structure analysis 111–12, 114 Multiple conjunct sentences 152 Natural order hypothesis 186

Index 241 Nautical metaphor 130 Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) 47 New Guinea 30 Newmark, P. 44 Nominalisation 44, 70–8 Núñez, R. 25 Ojeman 193 Ontogenesis 147 Ortony, A. 82 Orwell, G. 98 Othello, Shakespeare’s

Process (grammatical function) 70, 72, 74, 76, 78 Proportional metaphor 82–3 Prototype theory 31–2, 37, 39–41, 113–14, 198 Proverbs 65–6 Psychotherapy 46 Pythagorean theorem 21 Quantum Society 72

10

Parallelism (in analogy) 101, 105, 118 Paraphrase (as a cohesive device) 65 Participatory pedagogy 221, 226–8 Particles 156–66 Past participle 173, 176 Past simple tense 173, 175 Path metaphor 23, 139–40, 143, 147, 216 Pavlovian 45 Peake, M. 61, 78 Penfield, W. 192 Pienemann, M. 121 Phrasal verbs 139, 155–60 Phonological reduction 26 Phylogenesis 147 Placebo effect 47 Plateau (in language learning) 117 Poetic metaphor 45, 53–6 Political metaphor 13 Possession schema 173–4 Postmodernist 12 Poverty of the stimulus 187 Prabhu, N. S. 121 Prepositions, evolution of 26, 140; teaching of 156 Present continuous tense 87, 166 Present participle 167 Present perfect tense 173–8 Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP methodology) 57, 87, 172 Pre-syntax 200 Primary metaphors 23, 82, 200 Procedural methodology 121 Proceduralisation, of language knowledge 191, 196

Radden, G. 34 Ratterman, M. J 101 Reddy, M. 10–11, 135 Reference (in discourse) 168–72 Reh, M. 26 Reification metaphor 78, 79, 130, 131, 138, 173, 217 Relational structures 66 Relevance, Grice’s co-operative maxim of 7 Relevance, Sperber and Wilson’s theory of 7–9 Richards, I.A. 3, 29 Richards, J. C. 57 Ricoeur, P. 1, 5 Rinvolucri, M. 99 Roberts, L. 192 Romance language 26 Rorty, R. 5 Ross, J.R. 151 Ross, S. 47 Rosche, E. 29–30, 113 Saddam Hussein 13 Sadock, J. 5 Sapir, E. 25 Sapir–Whorf hypothesis 25 Schmidt, H. 31 Schön, D. 47, 61 Schwartz, B. 122, 186, 187, 190, 191 Scrivner, J. 227 Searle, J. 6, 95 Second language acquisition (SLA) 120, 121, 180–97 Seeker (grammatical function) 69 Selinker, L. 197, 198 Semantic contiguity see contiguity Semantic field see field Semantic parallelism 152

242 Index Senser (grammatical function) 68 Sentence meaning and utterance meaning 6 Shakespeare, W. 4, 10, 22 Sight-is-understanding metaphor 12 Silent period 186 Similarity 80–4; literal similarity 80 Simile 78–84 Simon, H.A. 46 Skinner, B. F. 122 Single-voiced utterances 223 Situational approach 87 Somme, battle of 19 Sontag, S. 13 Source domain see domain Spatial metaphor 156, 166 Sperber, D. 77 Sprouse, R.A. 122, 187 Stack and chair metaphors of writing instruction 114–15 Steady state (in first language acquisition) 187 St John, M. J. 130, 135 Strategic competence see competence Subject, Verb Object (SVO), word order 150, 194, 207, 226 Subjects, the two subjects of a metaphor 29 Submodalities 46–7 Subordinate categories 32 Suggestopedy 44–5 Superordinate categories 32 Swales, J. 111–13 Synaesthesia 189 Synaesthetic metaphor 12, 62–3 Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) 67–78, 120 Target domain, of a metaphor see domain Tarski, A. 5 Tasks (task-based methodology) 120 Taylor, S. 57 Tenor, of a metaphor 3, 59 Tense, teaching of 166–7, 172–8 Terrell, T. 122 Text-is-a-person metaphor 13 Text frame 111–12

Thagard, P. 44, 101, 103, 109, 110 Theilgaard, A. 45 Thompson, G. 68, 69 Time, the conceptualisation of 12 Time, metaphors of 11, 12, 25, 82 Tonfoni, G. 114 Traugött, E. 26 Truth-condition semantics 5, 79 Truthfulness, Grice’s co-operative maxim of 7 Turner, M. 18–21, 33, 84–6, 96, 199, 205–6 Tverski, A. 81, 101 Ullman, S. 33 Ungerer, F. 31 Universal conceptual metaphor 9 Universal grammar (UG) 187–9 Univocal 2, 49 Up as a verb particle 157–66 Up-is-happiness metaphor 23, 45, 82, 156 Up-is-increase, up-is-more metaphor 158, 162 Uptake, in second language acquisition research 186 Utterance meaning: sentence meaning 6 Vehicle (of a metaphor) 5, 59, 130 Vertical argument structures 110–11, 114, 116, 134 Visual metaphor 16 Vygotsky, L. 222 Waters, A. 103 Wells, H. G. 19 Willis, P. 36 Wilson, D. 7 Wittgenstein, L. 28–9, 31 Whole object assumption, in first language acquisition 200 Whorf, B. L. 25 Wright, P. 19, 21 Yates, F. 2 Yu, N. 25 Zobl, H. 185 Zohar, D. 72