Exploring The Relationship Between Metaphorical Competence And Communicative Competence

Since the notions of communicative competence versus linguistic competence were put forward, they have been discussed, debated and generally accepted as important concepts in language studies and language teaching studies. Communicative competence, which includes four aspects of competence: linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence, has been regarded as the ultimate goal in foreign language teaching. However, in the language teaching practice, there are some expressions and structures the learners seem never able to have a full command of, which go beyond the above four aspects of competence. When learners use target language to express themselves, they often manifest an asymmetry between the thinking patterns between the target language and their native language. This problem can be approached from cognitive perspective.With the fast development of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is no longer considered just as a figure of speech, but a figure of thought and a mental phenomenon, and our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Gardner and Winner (1979) put forward the notion of metaphorical competence, which refers to "the capacity to paraphrase a metaphor, to explain the rationale for the metaphor's effectiveness, to produce a metaphor appropriate to a given context, to evaluate the appropriateness of several competing metaphoric expressions". It is hypothesized that cultivating the learners' metaphorical competence may upgrade their ability tocomprehend and produce metaphors, make them more and more conceptually and communicatively competent in the target language.The present thesis is to explore the relationship between communicative competence and metaphorical competence. It raises this theoretical issue in the hope of enlarging our vision of communicative competence on the one hand, and improving language teaching efficiency on the other.The thesis begins with a literature review on metaphor study, compares different positions on communicative competence advanced by scholars in the field. Then the research question is put forward: Should metaphorical competence be considered as an indispensable component of communicative competence? As a theoretical exploration, the present research attempts to tackle the issue from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics. And finally it comes to a tentative conclusion that metaphorical competence should be concluded into communicative competence. However, many empirical researches are needed to prove this hypothesis.This thesis is of both theoretical and practical significance. On the one hand, it may shed lights on the theoretical issues raised concerning communicative competence, the nature of metaphor and of language itself. On the other hand, it may help second language teachers design language teaching in a way to better develop more native-like competence, and facilitate second language learning.