Figurative language and the advanced learner

Anyone teaching English at advanced level will have noticed that metaphor has become something of a buzz-word in recent years. Commercial teaching materials are increasingly incorporating aspects of conceptual metaphor theory as an aid to teachers and learners alike. There are good reasons for this: several studies have shown that learners who can access and make use of their knowledge of metaphorical concepts experience a positive effect on their ability to organise, learn and recall vocabulary, and have greater success in their on-line comprehension of previously unseen expressions (see Philip 2005 for an overview). The ubiquity of metaphor in the written language makes its presence in the advanced syllabus essential. But there is a gulf between teaching metaphor for comprehension and teaching it for productive purposes. As Holme (2004:97) explains, "It is a principle of meaning extension whose destination cannot always be predicted". In other words, it is not possible to predict which linguistic structures will constitute acceptable linguistic metaphors and which will not, even when the semantics match the underlying concept. In fact, previous studies have focused primarily on the role of metaphor in comprehension; and although virtually all make passing claims to its role in spoken and written production, these claims are not adequately substantiated. This article addresses the issue by analysing figurative language produced by advanced students, and comparing the data with general reference corpora and monolingual dictionaries in the students' LI (Italian), and the target language (English). In so doing, it will be possible to identify the extent to which the errors and phraseological oddities that occur in non-native language are caused by incomplete conceptual knowledge rather than incomplete linguistic knowledge.