Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching

Mind, Metaphor and
Language Teaching
Randal Holme
Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching
Also by Randal Holme
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Mind, Metaphor and
Language Teaching
Randal Holme
© Randal Holme 2004
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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.
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction xii
1 The Study of Metaphor 1

Early perspectives 1
The rehabilitation of metaphor 3
The problem of knowing when something is a
metaphor or not 5
Metaphor and relevance theory 6
The cognitive view of metaphor 9
Conceptual metaphor: how metaphors share
common themes 10
How we shape abstract concepts with the
metaphors we use to grasp them 11
The lack of a clear distinction between the
metaphorical and the literal 14
Metaphors as a transfer of meaning from
one domain to another: mapping and blending 17
How abstract meaning is conceptualised through
metaphor and image schema 22
Some of the conceptual metaphors that produce abstract
language are culturally-specific and some are universal 24
Grammar as originating in metaphor over time 25
Conclusions 27
2 Using Figurative Language 28

The language of metaphor 29
Stretching the domain 29
What categories mean 30
What teachers and students can do with their
understanding of categories 37
Achieving greater freedom with meaning:
describing things as other than themselves 44
Layering 49
v
vi Contents
Metaphors looking for a meaning 52

Conclusions 56
3 Teaching the Language and Structure of Metaphor 59

Metaphor and parts-of-speech 60
Metaphors that identify themselves: grammatical
metaphor 66
Elliptical similes 78
Marked metaphors 89
Conclusion 93
4 Allegory and Analogy: Teaching with Extended

Metaphors 98
Allegory 98
Analogy 100
Analogues, models and writing instruction 109
Teaching with analogy: conclusions 118
5 Teaching Lexis through Metaphor 120

Bridging the gap between learning theory and
language theory 120
Using metaphor to teach abstract meaning 124
Metaphor teaches students about language 126
Using metaphor in the construction of discourse 129
Expressing deductive and inductive arguments 138
Cause-and-effect paths 142
Conclusion 147
6 Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 150

Phrasal verbs 155
Tense and time 166
Reference 168
Expressing time 172
Conclusions 178
7 The Metaphor of Learning 180

Linguistic theories of language acquisition 182
There is no reliable way to distinguish acquired
language knowledge from learnt language knowledge 182
Generative theories of SLA 184
The modular mind 189
Cognitivist and generative positions 191
Student errors, CBT (cognitive blend theory) and
the remodelling of second-language learning 193
Contents vii
Towards a blend-structure model of

second-language learning 196
Cognitive blend theory (CBT) and language learning 197
How a CBT model can account for language learning 208
A blend-structure model of language learning:
understanding and correcting student errors 211
Conclusions 219
8 Conclusions 221
Cognitive not social relevance 221
Cultural empathy 222
Affective is effective 223
A kinaesthetic pedagogy: understanding the
physical basis of meaning 224
A construction-based pedagogy: exploiting the
spatial construction of meaning 224
A participatory pedagogy 226
Bibliography 229
Index 237
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
3.1 Proverb matching 67

3.2 Grammatical metaphor: the subject as a ‘charged head’ 76
3.3 Grammatical metaphor: a table to help students with
nominalised structures 76
Figures
1.1 An application of Fauconnier and Turner’s 1998

cognitive blend model: the landship and the
conceptualisation of the battle tank 20
2.1 How British supermarkets are rebuilding food categories 38
2.2 Blackboard diagram: ‘strange and dark place’ as a
metonym for ‘path’, ‘wood’ and ‘sunset’ 49
3.1 Exploring the language of sense perception 62
3.2 Using grammatical metaphor: actions impacting
on actions 73
3.3 Grammatical metaphor and the creation of textual
cohesion 77
3.4 Blends in the classroom: Koestler’s Buddhist monk 85
4.1 Analogical structure 102
4.2 Galileo’s analogy as a blend 102
4.3 Argument essay structure 111
4.4 Text frame showing a model research article
introduction (text from Mei Yi Lin, 2001: 19) 112
4.5 Applying genre models as blend structures 113
4.6 Argument structure modelling: from horizontal to
vertical argument 115
5.1 Teaching abstract lexis through concrete metaphors:
‘substantial’ arguments 125
5.2 Understanding the origins of words: from plough
furrow to dock 128
5.3 Using mind-maps to show metaphorical themes in text 132
5.4 Argument structure metaphors: setting ’em up to
knock ’em down 134
viii
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’ 136
5.6 Explaining empirical thought: some statements need
support from the world and some support each other 144
5.7 Explaining theoretical and empirical thought:
self-supporting statements vs statements that seek
support in the world 146
5.8 Metaphor and idiom: the effect of culture on a
universal schema 148
6.1 Model of a construction grammar 153
6.2 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schema
represented by the particle ‘up is dynamic’ 160
6.3 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schematisation
of the particle ‘up is achieved movement’ 162
of the particle ‘up is more and more sometimes good’ 163
of the particle ‘up is an end point’ 164
of the particle ‘up is an end point’ 165
6.7 Teaching phrasal verbs with the schematisation of the
particle ‘up is bringing lost objects to the surface’ 165
6.8 Teaching the present continuous as an adjective that
frames an action 167
6.9 Teaching the definite article as schemas branching
from a prototypical instance of use 168
6.10 Metaphor showing the indicative nature of the
definite article 171
6.11 The possession schema: mind as a storehouse of
continuing actions 174
7.1 Approach path errors: how errors reflect constraints
that are of reducing generality 195
7.2 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a
second-language phonology: step 1 202
7.3 Blend-structure model showing the perception of a
second-language phonology: step 2 203
7.4 Blend-structure model of language learning showing
metalinguistic interference 204
7.5 Blend-structure model of an XYZ sentence 205
7.6 Blend-structure model showing a failed category
connection 206
x List of Tables and Figures
7.7 Blend-structure model showing a failure of basic syntax 207

7.8 Blend-structure model of language learning: modifying
interlanguage with metasyntax 208
7.9 Blend structure language learning: cueing the
wrong register 212
7.10 Blend structure errors: how the meaning of ‘blood’
governs transitivity 213
7.11 Blend structure approach to errors: right image
schema, wrong category 215
7.12 Using the event-is-location metaphor to help students
construct and use English infinitives 216
7.13 Image schematic approaches to correction: ‘keep up with’ 217
7.14 Image schematic approaches to correction:
schematising ‘up with’ versus ‘up to’ 218
8.1 A time-line showing the English tense system 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 cog-
nitive linguistics. This book is very much a product of this new interest
and its rapidly expanding literature. However, the book’s primary objec-
tive 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 knowl-
edge 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 lin-
guistic 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 (sys-
temic 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 consis-
tent, scientific method. The abstract and symbolic nature of their for-
mulation 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 lin-
guistic 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 relation-
ship 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 lin-
guists 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 com-
bine 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 stud-
ies. 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 impro-
visation 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 class-
room 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 compe-
tence 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 forma-
tion is a vital skill for students and teachers alike, often determining
both how teachers communicate knowledge to students, and how stu-
dents grasp what is communicated. I will also argue that because anal-
ogy 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 cul-
tural 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 negligi-
ble 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 compar-
ison 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 emo-
tion, ‘love’, to a flower possessed of a seductive scent and form that is pro-
tected 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 compari-

son 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
2 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 imag-
ined 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 intro-
duces 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 estab-
lished 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 differ-
ent 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 self-
expression but that it was nonetheless a departure from normal language
use. Black argued that a metaphor such as 1, above, is different from a lit-
eral 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.
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 tradi-
tional 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 concep-
tually different; temperature is abstract and mercury a physical entity or
a metal. Yet the behaviour of one clearly reflects the behaviour of the
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 relation-
ship 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 short-
lived 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, dis-
tinct 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 cate-
gories 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
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 mean-
ing 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 sen-
tences, 3 and 4, below, we know immediately the truth conditions of 3
but would have considerable difficulty with 4.
3 The fly is on the ceiling.

4 The cat is on the ceiling. (Searle, 1993: 86)
5 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 comprehensi-
ble 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
produce a given utterance as the speaker. These rules restrict what we

can do with language. If they did not, we would make incomprehensi-
ble 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 lin-
guist 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 com-
petence. 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 lan-
guage 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 false-
hood. 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 mani-
festly 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
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 dis-
tinction 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 rele-
vance 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 Can’t you be friendly to other people?

8 Are you unable to be friendly to other people?
9 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 there-
fore 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
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, sub-
jects 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 lan-

guage 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 lan-
guage, 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 philosoph-
ical 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 distinc-
tion 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 integra-
tion 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
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 expres-

sions 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 com-
mon 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 ‘communica-
tion’, 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
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
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 exis-
tence 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 philoso-
phers such as Jacques Derrida.
A more plausible argument is that time is discovered or conceptu-
alised 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 direct-
ness. 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 under-
standing as seeing. Belleza (1992) looked at how this conceptualisation of
the mind as an eye and the concomitant metaphor of ‘sight as under-
standing’ 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
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 con-
ceptualise 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 contempo-
rary 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 treat-
ment. Morgan (1997) has put forward a set of different conceptual
metaphors through which managers can reexamine their company struc-
ture 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 conceptu-
alised 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 nego-
tiate 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
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, there-
fore 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 atten-
tion 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 con-
templation. Our discovery of metaphor within it may be more a func-
tion 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 truth-
conditional analysis of metaphor is that this poem both maintains and
violates its truth conditions at the same time. It is literal or metaphori-
cal 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
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 exten-
sions 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 dis-
tracted 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 some-
body 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 com-
mon 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 dif-
ficult factors. A metaphor may retain its strangeness because of the way
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 van-
ished 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 uncom-
mon 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 lan-
guage. 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 perform-
ance 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 ‘bright-
ness’ or ‘light’, then we can assume that the conceptualisation is very
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 mean-
ings. 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 lin-
guists 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 oper-
ates 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 exam-
ple, ‘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.
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 sow-
ing 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 inven-
tion 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 for-
ward or even positioned for an attack in the open without risking anni-
hilation. 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
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 actu-
ally 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 strate-
gic 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 expe-
rience. 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
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 bound-
aries 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 ‘match-
ing’ or forming ‘counterpart connections’ (Fauconnier and Turner,
2002: 47). In the blend each part can assume the other’s function to cre-
ate 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 Input
Warship as Land-vehicle,
manoeuvrable field gun,
artillery platform, caterpillar tractor,
sea swell Blend 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
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 essen-
tial to the successful realisation of the blend. This novelty was the
American development of the caterpillar tractor, allowing tracked vehi-
cles 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 men-
tal 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 compar-
ison 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 con-
cept of squared number is itself a kind of blend, resulting from the pro-
jection 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
at the level of conceptualisation, as when ‘space’ is ‘blended’ into some

poorly formed sense of our mortality, or of the transience of phenom-
ena, 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 pro-
duces 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 concep-
tual 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
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 embod-
ied 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 ear-
liest 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 experi-
ence 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 cen-
tral 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 connec-
tion. 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 connec-
tion 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 appa-
ratus of abstract expression is metaphorically structured. Effectively, we
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 con-
tainers 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 prod-
uct of Britain’s maritime culture. Britain developed a cultural predisposi-
tion 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 associ-
ation. 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
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 fash-
ioned blends pass into language may actually alter the way we conceptu-
alise 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 lan-
guage. 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 lan-
guages 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 uni-
versal 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 func-
tion, 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 dif-
ferent ways of seeing on language. The assertion is not that the impact
of culture is so strong that it forces different people from different cul-
tures to inhabit radically different realities. Rather, the same perceptions
of the same phenomena are categorised and expressed somewhat differ-
ently, 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
(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 the-
sis, 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 liter-
ally ‘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 con-
troversial, even within a school of thought about language that is fun-
damentally cognitivist. Yet a clear principle is the view that the study of
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 trans-
lates into the problem of knowing when language is or is not metaphor-
ical. 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 judge-
ment 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 phe-
nomenon 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 fig-
urative language allow us to conceptualise abstract meaning. Abstraction
begins as a figure of speech but becomes an accepted convention of lan-
guage. 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 abstrac-
tion. 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 obvi-
ous acts of metaphor production. The skills that are developed by recog-
nising 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 phenom-
ena 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 sub-
jects 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 paradoxi-
cal nature of a form that asserts something to be true when clearly it is
not. Philosophers and linguists use copula metaphors because they dis-
play 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 some-
thing else. A copula metaphor such as 12, above, illustrates how this can
happen because of the manner in which it retains two entities as sepa-
rate. ‘She’ retains the identity of a person, and ‘the world’ of the planet
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 stu-
dents 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 ani-
mal 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
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’ cate-
gory 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 cen-
tral 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 asser-
tion 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 pro-
totype 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 adja-
cent family members are similar even if they do not share traits of simi-
larity 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
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 com-
pliment, ‘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 con-
sider 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 real-
ity 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 con-
ceptual 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 cog-
nitively 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.
For example, we can say ‘buy some new cups’ and have a clear under-
standing of what is meant despite the fact that the ‘cup’ category encom-
passes 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 cate-
gory 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
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 partic-
ular 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 cogni-
tive 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 pro-
vided 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 attrib-
utes 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 prece-
dence 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
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, how-
ever, people attached greater importance to the funeral procession, per-
haps 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 vehi-
cle 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 exam-
ples. 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 meaning-
creation, 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
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 run-
ning down a busy shopping street’, or ‘a road bending round a moun-
tain’, 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 worth-
while 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
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 stu-
dents 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 rela-
tionship of language to them. To achieve this aim they used techniques
pioneered by ethnographers for the study of culture. An important prin-
ciple 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 con-
siderable cultural differentiation. This begins when one looks at its struc-
ture from the outside. Britain, for example, treats supermarkets as
temples for consumerism, and one or two recent examples are contem-
porary 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
cultures and responds to changing commercial pressures. Supermarkets are

like a metaphor for an exposed mind. They reveal the conscious con-
struction 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 gath-
ered 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 cate-
gory 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

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 asso-
ciation that perhaps mirror how it will be stored. Yet although the exer-
cise 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 cate-
gory. 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
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 talk-
ing 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 dis-
posal, however limited. When a chimney is evoked not through an elab-
orate 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 contigu-
ity 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
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 descrip-
tions 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’, ‘happi-
ness’, ‘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 interpre-
tation 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 abstrac-
tion 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 stu-
dents 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
the term instead of representing it, for example ‘Happiness is a nice feel-
ing’, 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 useful – usefulness

happy – happiness bright – brightness
strange – strangeness loveless – lovelessness
cold – coldness sad – sadness
mad – madness wakeful – wakefulness
lovely – loveliness
I asked them to write down metaphors that evoked these terms, repeat-
ing the example, ‘the moon on the branch of a tree is a fan’. The exam-
ple 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 pro-
duced 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)
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 (sadness, but provoking the

humorous intervention: happiness)
Safeway supermarket (usefulness)
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 con-
fusion 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 tar-
get 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)
Student: ‘The death kicks you down.’

Teacher: ‘Death kicks you over like a bucket and life.’ (gestures away
from their body with their hands)
Student: ‘Life, ah, goes out of the bucket.’
Teacher: ‘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 concep-
tualisation, then it is essential to a process where uncertain meanings are
given the identity of a known category. On the other hand, the ‘combi-
nations’ 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 relax-
ation 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
Lozanov (1978). For Lozanov (1978), such techniques still originate in a

behavourist or Pavlovian association of stimulus and response. The attach-
ment 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 fan-
tasies 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 back-
to-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 sup-
pressed 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).
Teacher: ‘Where are you going?’

Student: ‘I change.’
Teacher: ‘Why?’
Student: ‘This chair is broken.’
Teacher: ‘Sit on the floor!’
Student: ‘Funny …’ (not amused)
Teacher: ‘Why don’t you want to sit on the floor?’
Student: ‘It is dirty.’
Teacher: ‘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 superfi-
cially 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 cogni-
tivist 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 paral-
lelism 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 under-
standing of this. They treat learning and our receptivity to it as a prod-
uct of personal change, and try to achieve personal change through
what are called submodalities. Submodalities are features in our environ-
ment 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
as the colour of a room ( James, 1994). Gordon (1978) named such

representations, ‘metaphors’, and saw an instrument of therapy as aris-
ing 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.’
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 imag-
ination. 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 ad-
libbed 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
‘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 straightfor-
ward way. A place was described univocally, as a ‘a wood’, ‘a path’, ‘a sun-
set’. 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 descrip-
tion through the other elements they evoked and bring back the lan-
guage. 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
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 photo-
graphs. Thus, I gave a student a picture and told them to describe its
emotional impact without referring to anything that was actually repre-
sented. 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 sug-
gested. 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 reproduc-
tion 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 stu-
dents 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 sub-
ject in an extended manner and simply said ‘business’, then ‘big busi-
ness’. 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
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 associ-
ation 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 air-
craft 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 aero-
plane 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 construc-
tion of feminism in Middle Eastern society. He recounted how he under-
stood 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 rein-
forced 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 any-
thing 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 con-
flict. 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
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 con-
cepts 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 con-
crete references they had before them had forced a more extensive explo-
ration 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 stu-

dent’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 dif-
ferent 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 dia-
logue where meaning arises from a negotiation between the student and
the text.
Barry Kanpol (1999: 104) wanted to challenge the determinism of the

sociologist Jean Anyon (1980, 1981) and his view that children’s atti-
tudes to abstract terms such as ‘knowledge’ would reflect their class bias.
According to Anyon, lower-to-middle-class children would see ‘knowl-
edge’ as ‘to get the right answer’, and upper-class children as ‘to be cre-
ative, 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 defini-
tions. 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 mean-
ings 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.
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’ semi-
circle 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 burn-
ing 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 diffi-
cult 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 clus-
ter 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.
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 rit-
ualised 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 fail-
ure, 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 in-
coherent 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 mean-
ingless 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 peo-
ple 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
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 struc-
ture 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 lan-
guage and thus an enhancement of the language knowledge. My inter-
est 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 cate-
gories. 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
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 tempo-
rary 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 cul-
turally 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 meth-
ods were evolved from military training procedures. Pedagogical proce-
dures 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 com-
mand 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 curricu-
lum ‘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 geog-
raphy, 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).
Our interest is in the larger and more detailed texture of classroom

encounters and less in the achievement of specific objectives. Such prin-
ciples 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 mean-
ings. 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 gram-
matical identity in this way, since many metaphorical sentences do not
have a topic that can be identified in the lexis (MacCormac, 1985).
59
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 linguis-
tic 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
The Language and Structure of Metaphor 61
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 nar-

rative. 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: (reads) ‘his flat feet sucking at the stones.’ (Mervyn Peake,
Gormenghast) ‘What does sucking make you think of?’
Student 1: (an embarrassed shrug and a self-conscious glance at
some of his classmates)
Student 2: ‘A baby.’
Teacher: (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?’
Students: (no reply)
Teacher: ‘Here, the feet are sucking at the stones, not the stones at
the feet.’
Student 2: ‘The feet are sucking up the stones like porridge.’ (read-
ing the complete metaphor)
Teacher: ‘What kind of person is Swelter?’ (the description is
about the movement of a character called Swelter)
Student 3: ‘A big fat cook.’
Teacher: ‘Greedy. A big fat greedy cook who sucks everything into
him.’
Student 2: ‘A baby!’
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 mem-
orable 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 He looked well-seasoned. (author’s data)

19 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 mean-
ing 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 smell
Cold taste
Figure 3.1 Exploring the language of sense perception

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 pas-
sages 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 implica-
tion 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 … ?’
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)
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 Too many cooks spoil the broth.

24 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 lan-
guage 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.
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 applica-
ble 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 mechani-
cal 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 expres-
sions 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 shar-
ing 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
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 An acquaintance who could do little for
throw stones 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 An acquaintance who was so withdrawn
parted 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 Four people are trying to write one report
wait 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 mem-
bers 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
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 I saw him at dawn.

27 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 initi-
ating 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 percep-
tion. It is realising the function of perception.
We can say that the subject in 26 is a senser because it is sensing some-
thing 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) illus-
trates 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,
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 com-
municate 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 Dawn found him there.

29 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 pre-
supposes 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 It may rain.
31 I think it’s going to rain. (Halliday, 1985)
32 I think it’s going to rain, isn’t it?
33 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 auxil-

iary ‘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, rep-
resents the cognitive process which, congruently, it should name.
One function common in academic and bureaucratic texts is the dis-
guise 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
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 No undressing on the beach, by order.

35 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 per-
fect 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 appear-
ance, and their daily routine. The class constructed an image of narrow-
minded 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 some-
thing 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 nomi-
nalising ‘pressure’ on language. Literacy can be ascribed a tendency to
remove language from the physical relationships of the phenomena in

which its structures are partially grounded. Written text enables lan-
guage 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 phe-
nomena 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 con-
tend that students of language and science find these types of nominal-
isation 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 stu-
dents had to transform two sentences such as are found in 38 into a nom-
inalised 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 gram-

matical metaphors and gave colleagues a worksheet prefaced by that
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 aca-
demic 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 stu-

dents 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 short-
hand. 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
Cause-and-effect grammatical metaphor

The first truck hits the second and the second truck moves
cause effect
The in
fi
of all nite scatte
poten ri Our conceiving
tial th ng denies
ings 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 lit-
eral 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 evolv-
ing 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 devel-
opment 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, prox-
imity to some less mediated form of expression (Halliday, 1985). The geo-
metric 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 rela-
tionships as they are found in the world. In fact a more accurate descrip-
tion might be that a nominalisation expressing a cause-and-effect
relationship is using a metaphor of the impact of one object upon

another to conceptualise a difficult, abstract relationship. We can under-
stand 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 gram-
matical 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 con-
gruent language, but as an exploitation of the natural or direct relation-
ships 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 (move-
ment of the second ball). Yet these did not really elucidate the expres-
sions 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
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: ‘Yes, but is it a noun or a verb or what?’

Student: ‘A noun.’
Teacher: ‘What’s a noun?’
Student: ‘A thing or people.’
Teacher: ‘What’s “move”?’
Student: (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 impa-
tience 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 col-
umn 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 utilisa-
tion’, a verb from the central column, ‘encouraged’, to create a sen-
tence ‘greater capacity utilisation encouraged a more efficient use of
labour’.
Table 3.2 Grammatical metaphor: the subject as a ‘charged head’
My hand hits the table

Thing action thing
Action causes action
Movement causes movement
discussing problems encouraged the search for a common
bringing about a new social policy
order
forcing the pace of change
refusing to listen to sceptics
changing old customs
greater capacity utilisation
the introduction of new
procedures
Table 3.3 Grammatical metaphor: a table to help

students with nominalised structures
Created Use labour more efficiently

Accelerated Reduce unemployment
Forced Redistribute power
Encouraged Expand some types of activity
Impeded Search for a common policy
Motivated Localise solutions
Meant 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 impeach-
ment’ 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 impeach-
ment’) and ‘inflation resulted in poverty’.
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 ‘fight-
ing’ 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 suf-
fering. The suffering made the life in the country terrible. This des-
perate 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 mean-
ings 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 straight-
forward verb-to-noun transformation. However, the presentation of it
through a ‘thing–action–thing’ metaphor was a useful way to rationalise
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 sub-
sequent work.
Elliptical similes
In the SFL analysis, metaphor rests in a departure from congruent lan-

guage. Unfortunately, the concept of congruency does not greatly
advance our attempts to identify metaphor. Instead it moves the prob-
lem 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 out-
landish. 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 …
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 vio-
late 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 sim-
ile 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
‘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 simi-
larity 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 The house is like the one in Spain.

46 This house is the one in Spain.
47 This house is like a sliced melon.
48 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 empha-
sis (ibid.). This is because ‘like’ in example 47 is both marking and hedg-
ing 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 simi-
larity 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 demon-
strated 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
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 elab-
orating 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
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
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 concep-
tualised 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 feature-
sharing 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 essen-
tial 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 com-
monly 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 some-
body ‘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.
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 every-
thing because each thing is similar only to the thing that it adjoins.
Fauconnier and Turner’s blend model of metaphor does give feature-
mapping 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 differ-
ent 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
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 mean-
ingful 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 mis-
matched 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

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 under-
stand 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 func-
tional flexibility, and cognitive disembedding. Functional flexibility is the
encouragement of the learner to see a given solution as widely applica-
ble 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 prob-
lems 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
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 agree-
ment. 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 situ-
ations 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 exam-
ple. 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 proce-
dure, 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
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 dis-
course was probably made richer by its spontaneous refusal to engage
with the purpose of the lesson.
An approach that recognised the importance of finding feature-
matched 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 time-
tables, 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.
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 sim-
ilarity 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 infor-
mal 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.’
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 them-
selves 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 mention-
ing what had occurred. I suggested they do this by using the first expres-
sion 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 wit-
nessed this spectacle at a pageant. She then had to reword the metaphor
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 stu-
dent who had come up with the metaphor had to complete the sug-
gested 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 sug-

gested 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.’

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 inse-
curity 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 centre-
stage. 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 dis-
cussed 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 unstruc-
tured 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
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 con-
struct 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 expres-
sions 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 linguis-
tic 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
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 in-
appropriate 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 metaphor-
ical 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 encapsu-
lated inside its own terms and conditions of use, or its own compe-
tence 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,
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 fun-
damental 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 func-
tions 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 self-
contained. 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 moti-
vated 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 exis-
tence 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 physi-
cal 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.
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 mean-
ings 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 compe-
tence 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 charac-
terisation of a lexical competence as simply a set of sign-meaning corre-
spondences 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 The theory needs a securer foundation.

54 The theory’s been dug too deep, its sides need shoring up.
Sentence 53 latches onto a common conceptualisation of ideas as build-

ings or physical structures. We are not used to thinking of theories as
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 gov-
erning the language that we produce but a feature of how we conceptu-
alise 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 con-
sider 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 ani-
mal 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 con-
trol 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
Allegory and Analogy 99
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 equiva-
lences 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: ‘There was a girl who lived in a wood. She always wore
a red cloak and that is why they called her little red rid-
ing hood.’
Student: ‘We have that story in my language. It is an old story.’
Teacher: ‘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: ‘Who is the wolf?’

Student 1: ‘Saddam Hussein.’
Teacher: (surprised) ‘Saddam Hussein?’
Student 2: ‘I think it is President Bush.’

Student 1: ‘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: ‘This is not what I think.’

Student 2: ‘So you think like me?’
Student 1: ‘No, this is an American story. So the wolf is Saddam
Hussein.’
Teacher: ‘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 sin-
gle 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
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 anal-
ogy 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 mov-
ing 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 simi-
larity 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 relation-
ships 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 Target
ship world
Drop an object from a Drop an object from a

mast and the object falls tower and the object
at the base of the mast falls at the base of the
tower
Therefore the ship is Therefore the world

not moving is not moving
But everybody knows

the ship is moving
Therefore this Therefore this argument

argument is flawed is flawed
Figure 4.1 Analogical structure
Generic space
A moving ship mimics

the movement
of the
Input world Input
The ship, The world,

the mast, the tower,
the falling ball, the falling ball,
the deck where the the place where
ball falls Blend the ball falls
The ship world,

the ship’s perceived
movement is the
world’s unperceived
movement
Figure 4.2 Galileo’s analogy as a blend

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 coun-
terpart 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 ana-
logue 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 cir-
culation of the blood by showing them a central-heating system. The
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 com-
plex 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 rele-
vant 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 think-
ing from what is familiar to what is remote; finding in likeness, differ-
ence. 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
engagement with knowledge, and developing the linguistic expression

of that engagement.
In one approach I gave students a diagram based on the Galilean anal-
ogy 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 success-
ful 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,
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 infer-
ence 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.
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 situa-
tion 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 organisa-
tion 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 ques-
tions, 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.
I could have directed this analogy towards the common metaphor of

money circulating in an economy as opposed to through an organisa-
tion. 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: ‘What does blood do when it circulates?’

Student: ‘… carries oxygen to different parts of the body.’
Teacher: ‘Is that circulation ever interrupted or impeded?’
Student: ‘Yes.’
Teacher: ‘Why is it interrupted or impeded?’
Student: ‘The arteries are blocked.’
Teacher: ‘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 para-
graph. 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.
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 exer-
cises, 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 per-
ceived 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 com-
ponent 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
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 ana-
logue’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 trajec-
tory 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 discour-
sal 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 argu-
ment 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 intro-
duction 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.
Introduction
Argument 1
(summarise with sources)
Argument 2
Optional counter argument 2

Optional counter-counter argument 2

(reinforcing argument 1)
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 introduc-
tion 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 exemplifi-
cation and move production. Thus, in the first step, students are intro-
duced to the concept of a textual move as a constituent of a given genre,
Introduction content
General statement about In this chapter, I present a fine-grained analysis of a

the topic sentence 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 con-
temporary 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.
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) proto-
type 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
Prototypical
Raw notion of what genre model (e.g.
Mapping of prototypical genre
the writer wishes introduction, method,
to say features on to matched aspects conclusions,
of the writer’s topic results)
Blend
Textual
product
Figure 4.5 Applying genre models as blend structures

The diagram exemplifies a process, it does not specify the steps needed
to construct a particular genre. The input space would contain the proto-
type, 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 half-
schematised 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 exam-
ple, Swales and Feak’s (1996) book on academic writing uses an ‘hour-
glass 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 writ-
ing 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 expres-
sion of argument structures as vertical or horizontal. In order to encour-
age 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’ sup-
poses 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
Counter Main argument Counter

arguments 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 introduc-
tion 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 show-
ing 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 intro-
duction, leading to a central corridor that had two rooms on each side
and one at the end, opposite the hall. The corridor represented meta-
textual links that marked the shift from one room to another. It was
made clear that these links had to be clarified verbally. Each room rep-
resented 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 ‘conclu-
sions’, and to predict what these would be. Finally, they were asked to
show a way out into the garden behind.
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 associ-
ated metaphor of a building through which students must be conducted
may provide a concrete and thus more powerful method of communi-
cating the idea of structure. Diagrams simply represent abstract struc-
tures. 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 appro-
priate 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 philosoph-
ical 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 para-
graph 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.
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 lan-
guage 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 neg-
ative 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 instruc-
tion. 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.
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 rela-
tional 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 rea-
son 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.
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 develop-
ment 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
Teaching Lexis through Metaphor 121
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 com-
municative approaches also seek theoretical support from second-
language 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
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 phenom-
enon 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 com-
posed. 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 the-
ory 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 accom-
modate a view of acquisition where their objective is simply to provide
comprehensible input without it being mediated by our growing aware-
ness 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’
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 cogni-
tive hooks that are embedded in a language in order to make it easier to
learn or acquire. Metaphor, as the mechanism that reveals how gram-
matical 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 conceptu-
alise 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 lex-
ical 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 chun-
ked 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
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 under-
stand 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 ‘sub-
stance’ 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 mean-
ing 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, peo-
ple 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 argu-
ment’, 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 opin-
ion; ‘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 insub-
stantial 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
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 some-
what ‘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 conceptu-
alisation 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
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 learn-
ing. 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 lan-
guages 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 con-
sciously 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)
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 commu-
nicative needs of a culture as it develops over time. I therefore led them
into the riddle with a couple of questions:
Teacher: ‘Imagine a time when there were no docks or artificial

harbours. How did sailors bring ships into land when
there are no docks?’
Student: ‘They put them on the … coast?’
Teacher: ‘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?’
Student 2: ‘It is hard.’
Teacher: ‘So you push back the sand. What does plough mean?’
Student 2: ‘It’s for growing food.’
Teacher: ‘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 inven-
tively, 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.’

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 rela-
tionship 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
plough a furrow in
wake 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
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 map-
ping 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 net-
works 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.
In an earlier and related argument, Lindstromberg (1991) asked teach-

ers 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 speci-
ficity 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 under-
stand 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 ‘globalisa-
tion’ as an object moving with unstoppable force. Such a metaphorical
structure may help to hold the text together as a vehicle that also con-
veys 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 super-
power 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
grown on small environmentally friendly farms rather than South

American bananas grown on the huge estates of the American-
owned 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
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 lexico-
grammatical 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 concep-
tual 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 instabil-
ity’. This gives us such phrases as ‘at odds with’ where being in a condi-
tion 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

Resulting in regional
instability
Peace is an
equilibrium
conflict
is unbalanced
Banana/Beef war
X is an ally
of Y in this Business and trade
particular are war
skirmish X, Y and Z are
under attack
Protect the
(livelihoods)
Figure 5.3 Using mind-maps to show metaphorical themes in text

common domains of meaning or across networks of the same. Students

are often taught lexis through meronymy. This can be done uncon-
sciously as when a discussion about furniture will chain the different
items together or consciously through diagrams that situate the differ-
ent 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 metaphor-
ical 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
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 argu-
ment 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 achieve-
ment of an effective system of lexical grouping; they construct a plat-
form 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 mes-
sage 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 sim-
ilarity judgement, which is fossilised in language. As Lakoff and Johnson
(1999) are keen to stress, such schemas remain active in how we con-
ceptualise the world. Therefore, bringing students into a schema that
builds language provides them with both a mechanism of meaning for-
mation and a mnemonic that works because it is central to the nature of
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 language-
learning 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 conjunc-
tion 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 spe-
cialist 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 ‘con-
duits’ facilitate the movement of fluids. Equally, fluidity supposes a loss
of control or a ‘running away’ as when ‘a hardened’ or ‘frigid personal-
ity’ 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 metadis-
coursal schemas powerful because they are not only lexically produc-
tive, 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 appro-
priate 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
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 entail-
ment, ‘things known are objects seen’, and thus away from how we dis-
cover 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 perspec-
tive 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 into its

gain an
insight flawed
perspectives structure
perspectives
Figure 5.5 Writing metatext with the metaphors: ‘knowledge is sight’ and ‘the
author is a guide to their own text’
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’ dif-
ferent ‘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 vis-
ible 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 entail-
ment 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
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 com-
mon 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 expres-

sion 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 phi-
losophy, 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 conceptu-
alisation of states and states of being as locations, and actions as ‘self-
propelled motions’. The causal path metaphor can be analysed as follows:
Self-propelled motion → Action

Traveller → Actor
Locations → States
A lone path → A natural course of action

Being on the path → Natural causation
Leading to → Results in
The end of the path → 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 logi-
cal 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 recur-
rent 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 loca-
tion 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 → a state/location
towards → remediable state
about/around → turning/change of direction
on → on the path
in → the end state as a container or compound
over → an impediment to movement on the path
from → 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
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) sug-
gests 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 hierar-
chies 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 con-
tained 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.
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 struc-
ture metaphor (time is space) may be common to how humans every-
where 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 spa-
tial attachment. Therefore, dependency suggests the attachment of one
thing to another.
One student asked me why English said ‘depend on’ when ‘every-
body’ 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 chal-
lenged 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 down-
wards to show hanging as an action and thus gave the answer away.
I repeated in a somewhat laboured manner ‘hang from, hang from’.
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’ activi-
ties 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
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 con-
nection 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 pro-
vides 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 activ-
ity 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 ety-
mology 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
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
water
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
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).
Wanda loves water
Therefore Wanda lives in water
Wanda is aquatic s There is also

Thus/ u
evidence to
so p
p show/that
Wanda is a
All fish are aquatic o supports the
fish
r fact that
t
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 trans-
parency 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 exam-
ination of Wanda’s feelings and behaviour. I said that the world must
‘support’ this statement.
I tried this activity with a class who had not previously given much
time or thought to the construction of academic argument and the dif-
ferences 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’ image-
schema by explaining the origins of the idiom, reattaching it to the organ-
isational 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 lan-
guages ‘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.
Hunting, sailing, gardening and walking in crowded cities
Draw him off the A red

scent herring
Change of A change of tack
direction
Look at it from another
direction/ perspective/in
Changing place another way
is
changing topic Approach it/look at it
from another angle
Turn to another
Lead him down
subject/move on
a blind alley/up
Lead him off in the the garden
wrong direction 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 fea-
tures 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 speak-
ers 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 nar-
row 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 with-
out 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.
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 aware-
ness 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 sever-
est 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 lan-
guage resides in a syntax that controls the organisation of a sentence
without being affected by the meanings of the words or units in the sen-
tence. 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 transforma-

tional 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
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 What did John eat ____ and Bill drink? (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
69 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 for-
mal 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 John gave the book to Mary.

71 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 John gave the fence a new coat of paint.

73 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.
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 con-
structions cut across the componential model of language with the ver-
tical structure shown in Figure 6.1. The constructions are like lexical
items in that they ‘combine syntactic, semantic and phonological infor-
mation’ (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)
Phonological component
Linking rules
constructions
lexicon
Syntactic component
Linking rules
Semantic component
Figure 6.1 Model of a construction grammar

Source: Croft and Cruse, forthcoming.
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 pat-
terns that the student can generalise in a manner that includes any
appropriate lexis. Grammar needs to be considered as a process of nego-
tiation 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 colloca-
tion 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 exis-
tence 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 cook-
ing 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.
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 concep-
tual 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 under-
stand how conceptual domains build meanings in this way, they can
teach them as a schematic constraint that has a greater scope for gener-
alisation 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 appropri-
ate 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 overgener-
alised 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 com-
posed. 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
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 unpre-
dictable 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 parti-
cles 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. Preposi-
tions 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 organisa-
tion 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 prepo-
sitions 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 expres-
sion to the spatial metaphors through which logical and causal relation-
ships are expressed.
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 parti-
cles such as ‘on with’ or ‘up’. Such approaches also attempt some organ-
isation 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 prepo-
sition is drawing its meaning from a different metaphorical extension of
the original meaning, or from a different entailment of the same proto-
typical 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 prototypi-
cally 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 par-
ticle in English, because ‘up’ thereby extends its meaning to a referent or
schema that is not so much physically dynamic as indicative of some-
thing 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 ratio-
nalise 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 com-
pleted 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
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 distinc-
tion. 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 com-
ing 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: ‘But warmer than yesterday? ’

Student: ‘OK a little.’
Teacher: ‘So the temperature is going … ’
Students: ‘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
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 differ-
ent uses of the particle. However, the initial ‘up’, representing dynamic
upward movement tended to dominate, a feature that was perhaps rein-
forced 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 lex-
ical 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 accord-
ing to clear categories. In this I was influenced by Lindner’s (1981) pro-
vision 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
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 parti-
cle thus becomes a kind of intensifier to underscore the proper comple-
tion 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 con-
structed the six worksheets shown in Figures 6.2–6.7. The worksheets
show how these verbs were organised. Contrary to my previous conclu-
sion 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
The
Jump rocket
Organisation
goes up
Figure 6.2 Teaching phrasal verbs through the schema represented by the
particle ‘up is dynamic’
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 asso-
ciated 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 possi-
ble 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 sur-
prise teachers raised on a thematic or mono-contextual view of commu-
nicative methodology, yet it should now be clear that the sense of
analogy we are putting forward here entails the differently contextu-
alised 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 prob-
lems 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
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 rela-
tionship 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 back-
tracking 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 mer-
cury 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
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
Save up
20
10
0
Build up
Live it up
Put up (prices)
Keep up prices Cheer up,
Go up,
warm up, liven up,
heat up 60
freshen up
50
40
30
hurry up, 20
10
0
speed up
Talk up (values)
Grow up
Turn up (volume)
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 refer-
ence 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 accu-
mulation’, 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
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
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 them-
selves 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 com-
pletion’ by showing the rotation of the attained landmark in order to
Up is an end point
The end point is up, to be up is to stop
Slow up, draw up, hold up

give 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
Ideas are buried in the
mind,
think up an idea,
Look up dream up a wild idea,
information come up with an idea
Wake her up, she is

deep in sleep,
she is deep in thought
(to be up is to be present
Crops come up, strange
and in mind),
events are hidden until they
call her up, ring her up,
crop up
phone her 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 land-
mark is that the revealed items were hidden or buried. Therefore one
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 lexi-
cal 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 syn-
onymy 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 fol-
lows 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 metaphor-
ical 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 schema-
tised 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
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 con-
structions. 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 situa-
tion 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 bound-
edness through which the tense is conceptualised. Students are thus
provided with conceptual principle and not just a social condition of use.
Reference
The use of the definite and indefinite articles in English can cause con-
siderable 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 collo-
cates. In other words, they make up a schema. The conceptual under-
pinning 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 cir-
cumstances. 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 func-
tion 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 organi-
sation 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 nation of Japan

The planet Neptune The city of London
The planet Mars The government of America
The planet Uranus 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
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 imag-
ine 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 class-
room ….. 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 stu-

dent picks a person from an imaginary crowd, then has to describe what
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’ conceptu-
alisation 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 acqui-
sition, 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
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 out-
lined, 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
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 con-
text 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 stu-
dent’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 proto-
typical 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 metaphorisa-
tion 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
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 possibi-
lity 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 vary-
ing degrees of complexity. The present perfect/past simple distinction is
far from unique but causes considerable difficulty nonetheless. A curi-
ous 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 They keep the money.

83 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 par-
ticiple an object to which the student lays claim. Laying claim to the
verb is made synonymous with laying claim to the action that it signi-
fies. 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
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
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 distinguish-
ing 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 sim-
ple 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 dia-
grams 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 commu-
nicative and the older, situational approach. In this exercise, the teacher
tried to cast these prescriptions in the stronger metaphor of imprison-
ment in the past and release towards the present. Situational methodol-
ogy might tacitly acknowledge this by making ‘the prison’ the illustrative
example for the past simple. However, if forms are put forward as gov-
erned more by a situation than a rule, the student may not perceive how
they should be generalised to other situations. Equally, there is the prob-
lem 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 appro-
priate 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
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 struc-
ture 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 con-
structed. ‘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 pos-
session 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 pat-
tern 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 gram-
maticalised 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?’
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 distrib-

uted 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 class-

room 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 main-
tained 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
them spoke, and began to sound like an eerie theatrical chorus:
Trainee 2: ‘What have you done?’

Trainee: ‘I have found a balanced life.’
Class: (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 grammaticalisa-
tion 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
by how my students have often expressed frustration at both behav-

iourist 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 manipu-
late 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 gram-
mar 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 effec-
tive 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 struc-
tures have probably evolved out of core principles of physical interac-
tions 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 accu-
rately 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 con-
structions that are affected by the nature of the lexis they combine and
which constitute prototypical schema from which lower order generali-
sations 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 rec-

ollection 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 implica-
tion has been that a conscious or explicit understanding of the image-
schematic 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 acquisi-
tion (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
The Metaphor of Learning 181
cannot become acquired language. Our knowledge about a second

language cannot therefore help us towards achieving the reflexive mas-
tery 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 knowl-
edge’. 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 sub-
ject to question is a pedagogy that analyses language according to struc-
ture 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 predisposi-
tion, 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 teach-

ing 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 dis-
cussion 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 acqui-
sition requires dedicated properties of mind. It cannot be included in
a larger discussion of learning and cognition.
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 second-
language 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 knowl-
edge 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 consis-
tent 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 con-
sistent 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
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 experi-
ence 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 demarca-
tion 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 dif-
ferent mechanisms appropriate to each, so it is also difficult to identify
forms of linguistic input which are different enough to trigger the dif-
ferent 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 lan-
guage 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
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 learn-
ers 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 sec-
ond 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 mem-
ory. 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 prod-
uct. 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 par-

allel in the distinction made between explicit and implicit knowledge.
Implicit knowledge of a structure such as the English present perfect
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 knowl-
edge 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 inter-
feres 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 struc-
tures in the order in which they are taught but according to a natural
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 sup-
ported by several studies. Brown (1973) has provided evidence to show
that all children acquired certain morphological and grammatical fea-
tures 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 partic-
ular 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 second-
language 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 evi-
dence 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, remem-
bered, then later reproduced.
One way to respond to Maclaughlin’s concerns about how ‘intake’
becomes ‘uptake’ was by reworking Chomskyan theory concerning first-
language 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
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 repre-
sents 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 acqui-
sition ultilises the processes used with a first language. His thesis there-
fore 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
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 disap-
pears 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 avail-
able 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 sup-
posedly 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 consis-
tency. 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 suc-
cess than is normally the case and there would be no difference between
the results achieved by adults and children. UG could be partly buried
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 them-
selves. This is axiomatic to its being a linguistic as opposed to a psycho-
logical 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 con-
sistent. However, SLA/UG theory is now stating that UG is more a filtra-
tion 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 acqui-

sition theory and other developments of it is the problem of how second-
language 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 sense-
experiences. Unless we are suffering from a rare condition called synaes-
thesia, 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
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 meaning-
ful 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 first-
language 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 differ-
ent module, encyclopaedic or consciously learnt, and that which is nat-
urally 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 assem-
ble 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 rela-
tionship of both these language modules to other functions of language
and mind. The immediate problem is that it is difficult to avoid the con-
clusion 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
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 lan-
guage 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 conse-
quence 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
the type of modularity that Fodor’s position assumes. Traditional brain

damage studies, such as those of Broca (1865) and Wernicke (1874) sup-
ported the idea of language modularity by associating language impair-
ment with the two brain areas that now bear their names. Broca’s area in
particular had been associated with syntactic and grammatical prob-
lems, 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 per-
ceived as selecting brain areas that suit its particular needs, yet language-
associated 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 connec-
tions 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 con-
stitutes 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.
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 learn-
ing 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 approach-
path 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)

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 schematisa-

tions 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 con-
structions 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 lex-
ical combination.
In sentence 86, we see a problem that roots in a lower-order generali-
sation. 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 prototypi-
cal 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 con-
ceptualisation 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 conven-
tionally be termed lexical. Yet another way to see ‘a lexical error’ is as
a failure to acknowledge the quite specific constraints of English cate-

gory 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 operat-
ing procedure. The error originates not so much in the general concep-
tualisation 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 prob-
lem 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
e
se
win e
e
he ch w
on
siv
d
oti
en
i
m
tur wh
reh
’s
ch
dis ject
High level of
bt
ol comp
oa
generalisation:
Ic
or t an o
sc the
word order
to
su at is
schematisation
ho
is
lem
o
pp
Mid-level generalisation:
Ac
rob
failure in category
tp
conceptualisation resulting
irs
in an unacceptable
ef
Th
extension
No generalisation: failure to construe context
Figure 7.1 Approach path errors: how errors reflect constraints that are of reducing
generality
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 generalisa-
tion 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 sen-
tence could stand as correct if the context were different. The problem
does not lie in the boundaries of the category itself but in the misappli-
cation 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 second-
language 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.
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 ped-

agogic 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 knowl-
edge 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 knowl-
edge. These sources will blend in a dynamic and sometimes unpre-
dictable 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 prod-
ucts 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 construc-
tions reveal how meaning can govern syntactic form. They are schema-
tised on an approach path of different orders of generality, from the
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 methodol-
ogy, the prototypical examples are embedded in a context of remote or
limited relevance, students may unconsciously reject the schema as hav-
ing the potential to express their mind–world interactions. This makes
clear how an affective approach can help students to take emotional own-
ership 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) con-
cept 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
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 con-
ceptualise 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 bat-
tery. 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 gen-
erality. 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
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 cate-
gories which may differ between cultures and languages. In the process
of learning, a given term may be grasped as a singular translated mean-
ing 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 phenom-
ena 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 precon-
ditions. 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.
After the learner has grasped some rudiments of the TL, a third area of
input is from the interlanguage model itself. Thus a learner overgener-
alises 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 over-
generalises 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 syllable-
based 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 target-
language 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
Generic space
Production of
a given
phoneme
Input 2 Input 1
TL L1
Phonetic input 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 inter-
language. 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.
Generic space
Production of
a given
phoneme
Input 2 Input 1
TL Interlanguage
Phonetic input 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 expo-
sure. 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 exist-
ing 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 sys-
tems begin with the conscious understanding that they may have devel-
oped 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 pre-
viously understood intuitively. A heightened awareness may entail
a conscious attempt to compensate for the strength of the existing sys-

tem 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 inter-
language 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 develop-
ment 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
MPM
L2 ILM L2
L1
MLM
IL
L2
IL2
MPM = Metaphonological model

MLM = Metalinguistic model
Figure 7.4 Blend-structure model of language learning showing metalinguistic

interference
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 lexico-
grammar 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 con-
structs 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 combina-
tion of syntactic and lexical errors cited above:
91 I coach’s motion see. (I watch the coach’s movement)
Daughter
Father
Open-ended
Input space connector
Daughter (Elizabeth)
Father Open-ended
connector
(Hieronymous
Blended space Bosche)
Figure 7.5 Blend-structure model of an XYZ sentence

Source: Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
Coach
Instructional
example
Open-ended
Input space connector
Coach
Instructional Open-ended
example 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 some-
thing 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
Generic space
Observation
Input 2 Input 1
Observer Actor (charged

sees head)
coach’s motion 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 blend-
structure 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 sub-
sequently 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.
L2 L1 L2 L1
AAP SOV SVO SVO
IL MLM
SOV 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 sep-
aration 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 self-
correction, 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 schematisa-
tion the model also accounts for how some knowledge forms are sub-
ject to ongoing L1 interference, and others are rapidly proceduralised.
The model explains the oscillation between reflexive mastery and the
stumbling of overmonitored usage that characterises the development

of second-language knowledge.
3 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 knowl-
edge 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 uncon-
scious also. Language provides us with the means to think about lan-
guage. 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.
4 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.
5 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 schematisa-
tion has no trouble in accommodating the higher plasticity that gives
younger learners greater long-term success but promotes rapid attri-
tion 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.
6 The evidence for a natural order of syntax acquisition (Ellis, 1990). If nat-
ural 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 com-
plexities, blind-alleys and redundancies of any complicated evolving
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 cog-
nitive 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 construc-
tions 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 image-
schema 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 lin-
guistic 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.
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.
Generic space
Textual cohesion,
linkage of authorial
voice
Input 2 Input 1
Engaging a Interlanguage
formal academic Input, chunked:
reader to promote ‘as you know’ to
textual Blend engage an
coherence 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 pre-
ferred by English academic discourse: reader inclusion or reader exclu-
sion as opposed to direct reader address. Students can be encouraged to
schematise these blends by converting parts of spoken lectures into writ-
ten 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
Generic space
Life: the circulation

of oxygenated blood
Input 2 Input 1
Blood passing Romance form

round the means (circular-transitive)
of life Blend
Circulating the
means of life
Figure 7.10 Blend structure errors: how the meaning of ‘blood’ governs
transitivity
‘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 oxy-
genated 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 tol-
erant 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
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 sepa-
rated 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 hor-
izontal 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 per-
ceived 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 differ-
ent 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 sus-
pended 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.
into
The problem comes up into something
something bigger 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 (infini-
tive). 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
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 schematisa-
tion 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 inter-
rupted 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 diver-
sion 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 proba-
bly 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)
‘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, run-
ning 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 pre-
cedes 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 con-
frontation. 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 to
Face it
Figure 7.13 Image schematic approaches to correction: ‘keep up with’

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 morphol-
ogy 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 mean-
ing. They have also grasped the principle of nouns being preceded by
articles. However, there is not much evidence for a principled differenti-
ation 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
carried by repetition (mother study, mother stay). The English need for a
copula has also imposed itself, but the auxiliary ‘will’ has been substi-
tuted. 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 overgenerali-
sation is the use of ‘message’ for ‘information’. A failure to grasp aspect
(spoil from the mother) forces the schematisation of spoiling as an exces-
sive gift, ‘from the mother’ to the child. Also noteworthy is the phono-
logical 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 sec-
ond-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 straight-
forward phonological errors, with accented speech being their
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 dis-
tinguish 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 stu-
dent 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 inter-
language, 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 cate-
gories and constructions that language employs. This book has begun
the larger enquiry into how this knowledge of metaphor may affect lan-
guage teaching and learning. It began by thinking about it from the per-
spective 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 class-
room possibilities. However, accumulated methods should be indicative
of a methodology and I will now set out its broader principles as follows:
1 Cognitive not social relevance.

2 Cultural empathy.
3 Affective is effective.
4 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
the mind that will carry language through time. We can develop this
sense of a Vygotskian (1978) dynamic entailing mind as a social con-
struct 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 stu-
dents. The classroom can address the social nature of language by study-
ing 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 commu-
nicative 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 cre-
ation to knowledge application. Redressing that balance is not to advo-
cate 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 histori-
cal 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 sim-
ply allowing learners to direct lesson content away from a hypothetical
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 associ-
ations 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 representa-
tion 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 phys-
ical 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
When you
Although I’d came But now I’ve finished
I was still eating
finished the
main course
Past perfect Past continuous 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 incor-
rectly 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 communi-
ties 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 con-
struct their past experiences of learning or some other area of experi-
ence. 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 regu-
latory principles. Grammar must be embedded into the lexis whose
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 gram-
matical 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 con-
struction in a restricted context should now think more about what
I have called ‘concertinas’ of interrelated contexts. These are the situa-
tions 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 cog-
nitive processes. As this interference becomes open to conscious manip-
ulation 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 lin-
guistic input will not simply activate some dumb and purely reactive lin-
guistic 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 class-
room 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 par-
ticular form (restricted) then assisting in a conscious identification of
how it is constructed and used (clarification). Such a model makes a con-
siderable 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 communica-
tion 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 analogi-
cal 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 acknowl-
edgement 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.
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 unpre-
dictable language items that a given class will produce. I would now
stress how participatory teaching is about being alert to the opportuni-
ties 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 metaphor-
making 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 metaphori-
cally 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 exis-
tence 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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Turner, M. (1998) ‘Figure’, in A. Katz, C. Cacciari, R. Gibbs and M. Turner (eds),
Figurative Language and Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Tverski, A. (1977) ‘Features of Similarity’, Psychological Review, vol. 84,
pp. 327–52.
Ullman, S. (1962) Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford:
Blackwell).
Ungerer, F. and Schmid, H. J. (1996) An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics
(London: Longman, and New York: Addison & Wesley).
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Wernicke, C. (1874) Der Aphasiche Symptomen Complex (Breslau: Cohen &
Weigert).
Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language Thought and Culture: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf (New York: Wiley).
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations (New York; Macmillan –
Palgrave).
Wright, P. (2000) Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber &
Faber).
Yates, F. (1984) The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Yu, N. (1998) The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A Perspective from Chinese
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins).
Zobl, H. (1983) ‘Markedness and the Projection Problem’, Language Learning,
vol. 33, pp. 293–313.
Zohar, D. and Marshall, I. (1994) The Quantum Society (Ebudon: Flamingo).
Index
Abstract meaning, teaching the Brooke-Rose, C. 59

metaphorical nature of 124–6 Brown, A. 86, 104
Actor (grammatical function) 68, Brown, C. 186
70, 76 Bryant, P. 263
Addison, J. 35–6 Buckalew, L.W. 47
Affect 44, 46, 48, 58, 92, 221, 223–4 Burt, M. 186
Allegory 98–100, 118 Business-is-war metaphor 11, 130
Alps (Alpes) 36 Byram, M. 37, 57
Alverson, J. 25
Analogy 17, 21, 100–19, 129, 161, Cameron, L. 59
172, 188, 211; analogous Cartesian method 2
contexts 88 Cash-is-liquid metaphor 134–5
Anchoring 47 Category 30–40, 56, 194–5, 200, 201,
Animal Farm 98 206, 210, 222
Ankersmit, R. 46 Causation metaphors 70–8, 138–43,
Anyon, J. 53 216, 218–19
Arabic language 60 Centaur 22
Argument structures, horizontal Chinese language, Mandarin 25, 60
argument, vertical argument Chomsky, N. 7, 95, 186–7, 191, 192
110–11, 114, 115, 116, 134 Circulation, of the blood 103–4; of
Argument is war metaphor 11, 131 money 107
Aristotle 1, 18, 79, 138 Class inclusion 32, 89
Attributes (grammatical function) 70 Cluster principle 225
Author-is-a-guide metaphor 135 Co-ordinate structure constraint 151
Ayamaran language 25 Cognitive approaches to metaphor
processing 9–27
Baker, C. 218 Cognitive blend theory (CBT) 9,
Bakhtin, 223 18–22, 24, 102–3, 113, 181,
Balance, image schema 23 197–219
Barbera, M. L. 13 Cognitive disembedding 86
Barrier metaphor 137 Cohesion in text 137–8
Basho 137 Cohesive device, 65, 76, 130
Behaviourist, behaviourism 120, Collocation 123, 140, 154
122, 178 Communication-is-a-conduit
Belleza, F. 12 metaphor 10, 135
Black, M. 3, 29 Communicative methodology,
Blending see cognitive blend theory communicative language
(CBT) teaching (CLT) 121, 129, 161
Block, D. 12–13 Comparative theory of metaphor 1
Body-is-a-container metaphor 24, 25 Competence (linguistic) 7, 45, 48,
Body-is-a-nation state metaphor 13 95, 180; metaphorical
Boers, F. 133, 156, 157 competence 94–5; strategic
Boundedness 167 competence 40
237
238 Index
Conceptual metaphor 9, 10, 46, 82, Dudley-Evans, T. 130, 135

133, 134, 155, 166 Dulay, H. 186
Conceptualisation 12, 22–4, 25, 28,
123, 148, 200 Elgin, C. Z. 14, 16, 73
Congruent language 67, 68–9, 70, Ellis, R. 121, 196–7, 208, 209
72, 74 Embodied mind, theory of 9, 23
Connotative (use of metaphor) 44 Emotions, metaphors of 25–35,
Construal 152–3 50–1, 82–3
Construction grammar 153–5 Empiricism 2
Container metaphor 25, 140 Endoxa 4
Contiguity 33–4 English for Specific Purposes (ESP) 130
Cook, G. 96, 121, 183 Epiphenomenon 7
Cook, V. 122, 186, 187 Esartes-Sarries, V. 57
Cooper, D. 1, 3, 8, 14, 82 Essay writing 109–17
Co-operative maxims, Grice’s 7 Essay-is-a-building metaphor 115–16
Copula metaphor 29, 59–60 Essay-is-a-dialogue metaphor 116
Corpus linguistics 154 Ethnomethodology 57
Counterfactuals 19 Etymological enigma 127
Cox, M. 45 Event-is-location metaphor 216
Critical age hypothesis 197, 203 Explicit knowledge 184–5
Critical literacy 52
Croft, W. 150, 153 Family resemblances, theory of 31
Cruse, D. A. 150, 153 Fauconnier, G. 17–21, 84–6, 96, 199,
Culture, and category construction, 205–6
34, 37–9, 40, 200, 210; culture Feak, C. 114
and disease 13; culture and Feature sharing 83
language teaching 57, 87, 126–7, Field, semantic field 17
222–3; culture and metaphor Fillmore, C.J. 147, 150, 153
24–5, 66, 148, 200 Financial Times 138
First World War 18
Dani language 30 Flanders 18
Davidson, D. 5, 79 Fodor, J. 189–90
Deacon, T. 122, 192, 209, 222 Fox, A. 26
Dead metaphor 3, 45 Freire, P. 227
Decoding idioms 147 French, going-to future 27
Definite article 168–72, 218 French, grammaticalisation of the
Delacroix, E. 50–1 future tense 26
Demonstrative 169, 171 Functional flexibility 86
Derrida, J. 1, 5, 12, 200
Descartes, R. 2 Galileo, Galilean 101, 107
Domain, source and target domain Generative grammar 150–2
17–18, 60, 61, 63, 81, 82, 83, 98, Generic space; the blend structure
101, 103, 118, 129 model 20
Diachronic study of language 26–7, Genius, The Genius of the Place 20
126–9, 166, 169 Genre 79; genre-based approaches to
Dixon Hunt, J. 36 writing instruction 111–15
Double-voiced utterances 223 Gentner, D. 80, 101, 103
Downing, A. 69 Gibbs, R. 8–9, 17, 24, 35, 82, 95, 96,
Drew, P. 66 98, 196, 223
Index 239
Glucksberg, S. 34, 66, 82, 96 Illness, metaphors of 13

Goatly, A. 8, 15, 78, 89, 114, 130, 148 Image schemas 23, 27
Goldsmith, J. 151 Image schematic metaphor processing
Goodman, N. 80 9–10, 155
Gordon, D. 47 Immune system, metaphors of 13
Gormenghast 61, 78 Implicatures, Gricean 8
Goswami, U. C. 203 Implicit knowledge 184–5
Goya, F. 16 Indefinite article 168–72, 218
Grady, J. 23, 82, 200 Inference, in analogy 103, 110,
Grammar 9–10, 25–7, 67, 68, 112, 118
69, 72, 73, 87, 116, 120, 121, Inflection 26
150–79, 196, 198, 205–7, Inheritance, cognitive concept
215, 225–6, 227 of 199
Grammatical metaphor 57–78 Instrumental language learning 222
Grammaticalisation 26–7, 172, Interactional theory of metaphor 4
173, 178 Interlanguage 45, 197, 198, 199
Gregg, K. 23, 190 Iraq, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait 13
Grice, H. P. 7 Isomorphic 4, 63, 109–10, 118, 162
Guided fantasies 169
Jakobson, R. 5
Halliday, M. 68, 71, 73, 96, 169 James, C. 220
Haraway, D. 13 James, T. 47
Hasan, R. 169 Jeziorski, M. 80, 101, 103
Hatch, E. 17 Jin, L. 60
Hawkins, B. W. 156 Johnson, M. 11–12, 17, 23, 24, 82,
Hegel, F. 2 83, 85, 95, 98, 131, 138–41, 151,
Heine, B. 26, 27, 140, 156, 173 152, 162, 166, 191, 224
History, history-is-a-tree metaphor 109 Jordens, P. 181
Holme, R. 53, 91, 109, 117, 236
Holt, E. 66 Kanpol, B. 53
Holyoak, J. 44, 101, 103, 109, 110 Keysar, B. 66, 82
Hopper, P. 26 Khun, T. S. 47
Horizontal argument structures Kinaesthetic 224
110–11, 115, 116 King, J. A. 81
Hour-glass model of paragraph Knowledge-is-sight metaphor 123,
structure 114 133, 135, 136
Howatt, A. P. R. 121 Koestler, A. 84
Humanistic language teaching 44, Kövecses, Z. 34
92–3 Krashen, S. 121–2, 180, 182, 185,
Hutchinson, T. 103 186, 187, 190
Kress, G. 70
‘i’ language 187, 188
Idealised cognitive models (ICMs) Lakoff, G. 11–12, 17, 23, 24, 25, 33,
34–5, 154, 222 56, 82, 83, 85, 96, 98, 131,
Ideas-are-buildings metaphor 96–7 138–41, 147, 151, 152, 162, 166,
Idiom 15, 28, 43–4, 65, 129–30, 191, 199, 233, 224
147–9, 150–1, 153–5, 191, 198; Landmark 163, 164, 165, 166, 214
decoding idioms 147; maritime Landship metaphor, the battle tank as
idiom 25 a blend 18–21
240 Index
Langacker, R. 26, 74, 95, 152, Martin, E. 13

167, 191 Marx, Karl 64–5
Language as an organism metaphor Matching (forming counterpart
209–10 connections) 21
Language and Residence Abroad McLaughlin, B. 186, 190, 191
Project (LARA) 37 Meaning creation 28
Latin, future of 26 Medicine, metaphors of 13
Lawrence, D. H. 82 Mental predicator (grammatical
Layering 50 function) 68
Lee, D. 152, 153 Mental space 18, 20, 21, 84
Lemke, J. L. 68 Meronymy 40, 133
Lewis, N. 126 Metadiscourse, metadiscoursal
Lexical approach 123 schema, 135
Lexical metaphor 67 Metalanguage, 116; metalinguistic
Lexicalisation 3 knowledge 160, 210;
Lexicalised metaphor 3 metalinguistic model
Life-is-a-journey metaphor 10, 82 204–5, 208
Lin, Mei Yi 112 Metaphonological awareness 203
Lindner, S. 156, 157, 159 Metaphor: adjective metaphors 62;
Lindstromberg, S. 130, 156 adjunct metaphors 64–5;
Liquid-is-movement metaphor adjunct-to-locative-subject
130, 134 metaphor 69; adverb metaphors
Literacy 36, 52, 70–1 63; copula metaphors 29,
Literal and metaphorical language 3, 59–60; sentential metaphors 65;
5, 6, 8, 9, 14–17, 27, 32, 40, 42, synaesthetic metaphors 62;
43, 48, 53, 60, 65, 66, 73, 78, 79, verb metaphors 60
80, 83, 89, 94, 99, 120, 145; literal Metaphorical competence 94–5
similarity see similarity Metaphors of organisation 13, 57,
Literature teaching 53 109
Location-event-structure Metatext 13, 116, 123
metaphor 138 Metonymy 33–5, 40, 49, 56, 120
Locative-subject metaphor 69 Mind-maps 132
Locke, P. 69 Mnemonic 2, 12, 134, 149, 171
Lockhart, C. 57 Modality 69
Low, G. D. 13, 94–5 Modals, modal verbs 69
Lozanov, G. 45 Modelling (in neuro-linguistic
Lupton, D. 13 programming) 47
Models 109–14, 118
Macbeth, Shakespeare’s 53–6 Modularity 188, 189–90, 192
MacCormac, E.R. 60 Monitor theory 185
Mapping 9, 17–18, 82, 84, 129; Morgan, G. 13, 57, 109
counterpart mapping 113, 199, Morgan, J. 99
202, 203; feature mapping 84; Morpheme studies, natural order 186
deep structure mapping 86; Moskowitz, G. 44, 45, 169
partial cross-space mapping 84 Mother tongue (MT) teaching 36
Marie-Celeste, the ghost-ship Movement (in syntax) 151–2
metaphor 70 Moves, move structure analysis
Maritime metaphor 24–5 111–12, 114
Markman, E. M. 200 Multiple conjunct sentences 152
Marshall, I. 72 Natural order hypothesis 186
Index 241
Nautical metaphor 130 Process (grammatical function) 70,

Neuro-linguistic programming 72, 74, 76, 78
(NLP) 47 Proportional metaphor 82–3
New Guinea 30 Prototype theory 31–2, 37, 39–41,
Newmark, P. 44 113–14, 198
Nominalisation 44, 70–8 Proverbs 65–6
Núñez, R. 25 Psychotherapy 46
Pythagorean theorem 21
Ojeman 193
Ontogenesis 147 Quantum Society 72
Ortony, A. 82
Orwell, G. 98 Radden, G. 34
Othello, Shakespeare’s 10 Ratterman, M. J 101
Reddy, M. 10–11, 135
Parallelism (in analogy) 101, 105, Reference (in discourse) 168–72
118 Reh, M. 26
Paraphrase (as a cohesive device) 65 Reification metaphor 78, 79, 130,
Participatory pedagogy 221, 226–8 131, 138, 173, 217
Particles 156–66 Relational structures 66
Past participle 173, 176 Relevance, Grice’s co-operative
Past simple tense 173, 175 maxim of 7
Path metaphor 23, 139–40, 143, Relevance, Sperber and Wilson’s
147, 216 theory of 7–9
Pavlovian 45 Richards, I.A. 3, 29
Peake, M. 61, 78 Richards, J. C. 57
Penfield, W. 192 Ricoeur, P. 1, 5
Pienemann, M. 121 Rinvolucri, M. 99
Phrasal verbs 139, 155–60 Roberts, L. 192
Phonological reduction 26 Romance language 26
Phylogenesis 147 Rorty, R. 5
Placebo effect 47 Ross, J.R. 151
Plateau (in language learning) 117 Ross, S. 47
Poetic metaphor 45, 53–6 Rosche, E. 29–30, 113
Political metaphor 13
Possession schema 173–4 Saddam Hussein 13
Postmodernist 12 Sadock, J. 5
Poverty of the stimulus 187 Sapir, E. 25
Prabhu, N. S. 121 Sapir–Whorf hypothesis 25
Prepositions, evolution of 26, 140; Schmidt, H. 31
teaching of 156 Schön, D. 47, 61
Present continuous tense 87, 166 Schwartz, B. 122, 186, 187, 190, 191
Present participle 167 Scrivner, J. 227
Present perfect tense 173–8 Searle, J. 6, 95
Presentation, Practice, Production Second language acquisition (SLA)
(PPP methodology) 57, 87, 172 120, 121, 180–97
Pre-syntax 200 Seeker (grammatical function) 69
Primary metaphors 23, 82, 200 Selinker, L. 197, 198
Procedural methodology 121 Semantic contiguity see contiguity
Proceduralisation, of language Semantic field see field
knowledge 191, 196 Semantic parallelism 152
242 Index
Senser (grammatical function) 68 Thagard, P. 44, 101, 103, 109, 110

Sentence meaning and utterance Theilgaard, A. 45
meaning 6 Thompson, G. 68, 69
Shakespeare, W. 4, 10, 22 Time, the conceptualisation of 12
Sight-is-understanding metaphor 12 Time, metaphors of 11, 12, 25, 82
Silent period 186 Tonfoni, G. 114
Similarity 80–4; literal Traugött, E. 26
similarity 80 Truth-condition semantics 5, 79
Simile 78–84 Truthfulness, Grice’s co-operative
Simon, H.A. 46 maxim of 7
Skinner, B. F. 122 Turner, M. 18–21, 33, 84–6, 96,
Single-voiced utterances 223 199, 205–6
Situational approach 87 Tverski, A. 81, 101
Somme, battle of 19
Sontag, S. 13 Ullman, S. 33
Source domain see domain Ungerer, F. 31
Spatial metaphor 156, 166 Universal conceptual metaphor 9
Sperber, D. 77 Universal grammar (UG) 187–9
Sprouse, R.A. 122, 187 Univocal 2, 49
Stack and chair metaphors of writing Up as a verb particle 157–66
instruction 114–15 Up-is-happiness metaphor 23, 45,
Steady state (in first language 82, 156
acquisition) 187 Up-is-increase, up-is-more metaphor
St John, M. J. 130, 135 158, 162
Strategic competence see Uptake, in second language
competence acquisition research 186
Subject, Verb Object (SVO), word Utterance meaning: sentence
order 150, 194, 207, 226 meaning 6
Subjects, the two subjects of a
metaphor 29 Vehicle (of a metaphor) 5, 59, 130
Submodalities 46–7 Vertical argument structures 110–11,
Subordinate categories 32 114, 116, 134
Suggestopedy 44–5 Visual metaphor 16
Superordinate categories 32 Vygotsky, L. 222
Swales, J. 111–13
Synaesthesia 189 Waters, A. 103
Synaesthetic metaphor 12, 62–3 Wells, H. G. 19
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) Willis, P. 36
67–78, 120 Wilson, D. 7
Wittgenstein, L. 28–9, 31
Target domain, of a metaphor see Whole object assumption, in first
domain language acquisition 200
Tarski, A. 5 Whorf, B. L. 25
Tasks (task-based methodology) 120 Wright, P. 19, 21
Taylor, S. 57
Tenor, of a metaphor 3, 59 Yates, F. 2
Tense, teaching of 166–7, 172–8 Yu, N. 25
Terrell, T. 122
Text-is-a-person metaphor 13 Zobl, H. 185
Text frame 111–12 Zohar, D. 72

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Mind, Metaphor and

List of Tables and Figures viii

1 The Study of Metaphor 1

2 Using Figurative Language 28

Metaphors looking for a meaning 52

3 Teaching the Language and Structure of Metaphor 59

4 Allegory and Analogy: Teaching with Extended

5 Teaching Lexis through Metaphor 120

6 Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar 150

7 The Metaphor of Learning 180

Towards a blend-structure model of

3.1 Proverb matching 67

1.1 An application of Fauconnier and Turner’s 1998

5.5 Writing metatext with the metaphors: ‘knowledge

7.7 Blend-structure model showing a failure of basic syntax 207

I would like to extend particular gratitude to Professor Mike Byram for

The last few decades have seen an upsurge of research interest in

1 A theoretical enquiry may be triggered by an applied need.

In language teaching, the first case is plain. Teachers want to explain

Chapter 3 will consider how some types of metaphor may be better

Although current scholarly interest in metaphor dates largely from the

1 The transformation of a conventional meaning through its compari-

Aristotle also expressed the interest of classical rhetoricians in metaphor

rhetorical tradition, metaphor was also seen as able to help a speaker to

kind was dead metaphor. An example of a dead metaphor would be the

The rehabilitation of metaphor

In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards (1936), made one of the twentieth

1 Life is a game of chess.

Black’s larger and more enduring contribution was the interactional

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

The problem of knowing when something is a

statement if it is ‘white’ but might start to deviate from the same if it

3 The fly is on the ceiling.

Example 4 reveals how a sentence that meets a truth-condition test is

Metaphor and relevance theory

A formal linguist proceeds on the assumption that we can understand

produce a given utterance as the speaker. These rules restrict what we

of the metaphor, ‘women are angels wooing’, we know that ‘women

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

Arguably, 6 triggers a search through one implicature after another, with

Metaphor and relevance theory: cognitive criticisms

7 Can’t you be friendly to other people?

should be construed literally, the second, figuratively. Thus, a literal

The cognitive view of metaphor

Gibbs’ conclusion that we can compute the meaning of non-literal lan-

1 The reduction of metaphors as they occur in language to a finite set

grammar means understanding how it has thus evolved by metaphor

I will now explore each of these points in turn.

Conceptual metaphor: how metaphors share

Reddy (1993) observed how the vehicles of the metaphorical expres-

10 Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt,

widespread, touching upon, for example, the way we conceptualised

How we shape abstract concepts with the

one of the metaphors that we use to describe it in language. Lakoff and

learning task (1992), or in which we frame the issue of second-language

through which it is conceptualised. Equally, looking at something

The lack of a clear distinction between the

A very famous Japanese poem can roughly be translated as follows:

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

Metaphors as a transfer of meaning from

It should be clear that a cognitive approach to metaphor means looking

of the other European powers in favour of a small professional force

Figure 1.1 An application of Fauconnier and Turner’s 1998 cognitive blend

at the level of conceptualisation, as when ‘space’ is ‘blended’ into some