Analysis of Dorothy Day's

Analysis of Dorothy day's

Introduction

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman, and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning.

Discussion

Approaching metaphor conceptually has several advantages. First, it allows for instances of metaphor that are visual, linguistic, or auditory, or mixtures of the three. Secondly, it allows the analyst to find the metaphor in conventional expressions, such as phrasal verbs. Thus conventional expressions, such as plan ahead, keep on working, or back in the 60s, as well as less standard ones like a career crossroads, can be seen as instantiating the same conceptual metaphor progress through time is forward motion. The conceptual viewpoint has proved particularly successful in identifying metaphors underlying abstractions in both basic vocabulary and everyday thinking: argument is often thought of in terms of warfare, understanding is often expressed in terms of seeing, love is often thought of in terms of a physical force, and ideas are often thought of in terms of objects. Lastly, the conceptual approach has brought out the complexity and systematicity involved in many metaphors, allowing them at times to be clustered in higher-level models of, for example, anger. The linguistic approach to metaphor is equally important, particularly for language learners, as it focuses on the words that are actually used, and stresses the importance of phraseology and collocation.

The very ubiquity of both linguistic and conceptual metaphor suggests that second language learners may have to make metaphoric connections between ideas on a regular basis, as metaphoric extensions of word meaning are likely to account for many of the vocabulary items that they encounter. For example, the mouth of a river, the eye of a needle, and the head of the company are commonplace expressions ...