Metaphors In Figurative Language

In broad terms, metaphor is referred to as describing something in terms of another unrelated entity; as an example, we can refer to the well-known literary quotation ‘Juliet is the sun’. Metaphors are used to convey humor, to refer to shared knowledge, and to denote topic change (Cameron, 2003; Semino, 2008). Metaphor mediates human understanding and world view (Lan, 2005). Metaphor is intimately related to people’s ways of deciphering the world. It is an avenue of cognizing the world and has penetrated every corner of our daily life (Zhang & Hu, 2009). Metaphors assist with significant pedagogical functions such as description, explanation, and evaluation (Corts & Pollio, 1999; Cameron, 2003). They are also influential in the creation of

Modern studies of metaphor highlight its nearly unlimited range. An important fact about using metaphors is that they are not spread evenly across conversations, but rather appear in bursts or clusters in respond to various factors (Cameron & Stelma, 2004). They are used more frequently when the topic of conversation is somehow complicated. And analysis of conversations has also revealed that metaphors satisfy significant interactional, academic and discourse purposes during face-to-face conversations between people. Metaphors can be repeated, reworded or challenged in the course of a conversation (Gibbs & Cameron, 2008), and are frequently used to shape a speaker’s attitude toward the topic of a conversation. In conversation between native speakers (NSs) of English, metaphor appears to play an important role in managing discourse and in conveying evaluative meanings (Littlemore, MacArthur, Cienki & Holloway,

Conceptual metaphors provide us with the possibility of seeing one thing in terms of another. This quality enables us to link the senses of a lexical item in one domain to its related metaphorical senses in another domain, thus extending the senses of the same word forms. Students are also guided to search for the different senses of the same word forms, and to link one domain to another. In this way, students can easily memorize the meanings of a word (Zhang & Hu, 2009). Each time humankind twist the kaleidoscope of their thinking, metaphor is displayed differently – different colors, different shapes, and more alluring. But our understanding of metaphor – metaphor production in particular – is still limited. Our knowledge of the way metaphors are produced by second language (L2) learners is even less (Thi Doan Ha,