The Cognition Of Conventional Metaphorical Expressions By Chinese L2 Learners

Since the pioneering work Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), there has been a metaphormania in various branches of research. Metaphor is viewed from the perspective of contemporary theory a matter of thought, a means that human beings use to cognize, to think and act, and to develop their language.This notion has opened up a brand new scope not only for metaphor research, but also the area of SLA research. The ubiquity and universality of metaphor, as well as the function and realization of metaphor provide evidence for the possibility of the acquisition of metaphorical expressions which are the linguistic manifestations of the underlying conceptual metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson(1980), conventional metaphorical expressions, which are adopted by a significant part of a language community, and thus considered metaphorical by few people in that community, have great cognitive value. Therefore, those expressions are of great importance for L2 learners. This paper, aiming at drawing a general picture of L2 learners' comprehension and production of conventional metaphorical expressions, carried out tests and questionnaire among 59 freshmen and 58 juniors from SHNU (Shanghai Normal University), all of whom were English majors. It turned out that L2 students were poor in comprehending metaphorical expressions with significant variation between the comprehension of metaphorical expressions and their literal pairs; their expression production was characterized by an overwhelming degree of literalness, which is monotonous and inexpressive. The majority of students were not yet aware of the cognitive value of metaphorical language but its rhetorical feature.This paper echoes the urgent need of the cultivation of metaphorical competence, which ought to be essential to knowing a language and thus an indispensable part of foreign language teaching. This paper also calls for continuous comparative study of Chinese and English conceptual system and the emphasis that should be given to metaphorical competence in language assessment.