From Concept to Wording and Back Again: Features of learners’ production of figurative language

Although still somewhat in its infancy, metaphor awareness in the teaching and learning of foreign languages is attracting increasing importance. A working awareness of metaphor and the figurative extension of meaning is a valuable tool for learners, and studies have repeatedly shown that encouraging students to refer to macro-metaphors and conceptualisations in their attempts to comprehend new language items has a positive effect on their ability to interpret and store new vocabulary. But there is a gulf between teaching metaphor for comprehension and teaching it for productive purposes. In fact, existing studies focus primarily on the role of metaphor in comprehension alone, and although virtually all of them make passing claims to its role in spoken and written production, these claims are not adequately substantiated. This paper seeks to address the issue by analysing figurative language produced by advanced students, and comparing the data with general reference corpora in the students’ native language (L1), Italian, and the target language (L2), English. This analysis aims to assess the conceptual overlaps and mis-matches holding between the two languages, and to ascertain to what extent conceptual disfluency (after Danesi 1994:454) can account for the errors and phraseological oddities that occur in non-native language production.