Important for Foreign Language Learners?
2.7 Figurative thinking and similes
Formally, similes seem simple and they are frequently treated as such by language course books. On the surface, there are always two explicit terms
and they are connected by an adverbial such as ‘as’ or ‘like’, or by a verb such as ‘resembles’ or ‘is similar to’. The learner only needs to find the con-nection and s/he can be absolutely certain that a comparison is needed. As if in answer to the learner’s plight, many such utterances do actually con-tain the Ground directly (‘Jean is like a rose in that she has smooth pink skin’) or by implication and ironically (‘it’s as clear as mud’), so there can be little need to think much about why the terms are being connected.
If we define simile formally as a comparison with a linguistic marker, then not all similes are figurative; ‘John is like Fred, in the sense that they both have red hair’ is a straightforward non-figurative comparison.
However, if we define simile rhetorically as an overt comparison between two disparate entities, then we start to enter the realm of figurative think-ing. The standard conceptual metaphor view of similes is that the figura-tive ones are rather uninteresting, as they are simply weakened or hedged metaphors (Lakoff and Turner, 1989: p. 133). Remove the ‘like’ and you have the same meaning only stronger. There is also a psychological the-ory, the ‘comparison theory’, which argues much the same thing.
Advocates of the comparison theory, such as Chiappe and Kennedy (2000) – not conceptual metaphor theorists as it happens – believe that metaphor comprehension and simile comprehension are similar. For comparison theorists, this means that listeners/readers need to find in each case relevant common properties between the two parts of the expression.
It is easy to demonstrate this view does not adequately explain all sim-ile that learners are likely to come across, or the thinking learners must engage in. First, some figurative similes involve metonymy rather than metaphor. If we take the comment from teachers that ‘Teaching is like organizing’ (see Oxford et al., 1998), we have to recognise that organis-ing plays a large part in virtually all teachorganis-ing. That is simply what teach-ers do. The ‘like’ here may be foregrounding the organisational aspects of teaching, or generalising to other types of organising. The reader may therefore need to think along two lines, one metonymic the other metaphoric, and decide which is more important in context.
A further type of difference between metaphor and simile can be shown from three short paired examples. The first involves the idiomatic ‘X is a joke’, the second is literary (from Adrien Henri’s poem
‘Love is …’), the third is invented:
Life is a joke Life is like a joke
Love is a fan club with only two fans Love is like a fan club with only two fans Love is a Catholic priest getting married Love is like a Catholic priest getting married
‘Life is like a joke’ might actually imply that life has a dimension of humour to it. ‘Life is a joke’, on the other hand, implies exactly the opposite, namely that life is so grim that it is hard to believe the Deity was being serious. Humour, entertainment, amusement and pleasure are only relevant in the simile.
In the fan club example, it can be hard to even put a meaning on the simile, the more one thinks about it. Fan clubs consist of a celebrity who is the focus of interest, but not necessarily a member, and a set of fans who may not even know each other. The metaphor requires us to restructure our notion of a fan club, so that each fan becomes an object of intense interest to the other. The rhetorical power derives precisely from the need to restructure ‘fan club’. The simile conveys no such need, and indeed love is not like such a fan club.
The difference is even clearer in the priest example. The simile sug-gests horror, awfulness, (or cynicism perhaps) as priests are morally sworn to celibacy: marriage is ‘like’ something awful. The metaphor, on the other hand, may suggest sympathy and warmth: extreme devotion to the point that you are prepared to break all other vows. To reach this interpretation, though, you need to background the immediate moral reaction to vow breaking.
All three pairs illustrate a common fact about similes; they tend to focus attention on typical, or central, characteristics of the Source (or Vehicle), while metaphors may, as we showed earlier, involve peripheral, or non-central, characteristics and require the interpreter to do more conceptual restructuring. This difference in types of attribute or relation may help account for the fact that metaphors often appear to be more open-ended than similes. This ought, on balance, to make figurative thinking routines more straightforward for similes.
We know of no experimental studies exploring the interpretation of simile by foreign language learners, especially where simile is more than just a relational analogy in, say, a Physics lesson. We therefore simply conclude, first, that instances of simile cannot always be treated as if they were direct instances of A IS B metaphor and, second, that figura-tive thinking would still seem to be necessary, especially if the Ground is not stated directly.
2.8 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have seen that figurative thinking can contribute to foreign language learning in at least two ways. First, by alerting learners to the figurative processes that underlie extended word meanings, it appears to be possible to promote deeper learning, longer retention and more flexible use of existing vocabulary, especially where teachers and learners work together, imagery is involved and learners have some understanding of how common conceptual patterns operate in the L2.
Second, the research evidence strongly suggests that straightforward querying routines can be effective as a way of promoting both compre-hension and recall. Evidence for aiding production is very limited and evidence about L2 metonymy appears non-existent.
In Chapter 3 we look in more depth at the nature of figurative thinking itself and try to make connections with specific psychological processes or skills, particularly trainable ones, that appear to underlie it or be closely associated with it. We will discuss how foreign language learners might be encouraged to employ these processes so as to increase their figurative thinking capacity in the context of their foreign language learning.