The role of figurative thinking in performing ideational functions

Ideational functions, according to Bachman, refer to the use of language to exchange information and our feelings about that information.

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Figurative language is involved in ideational functions, as we often use it to convey our evaluation of a situation. An inability to understand the language used can thus lead a listener or reader to misinterpret the evaluation offered by the speaker or writer. Some figurative language simply reports in a fairly neutral way: ‘The Conservative Party held the view that …’, ‘A few people ‘spoke up for him’, or ‘He touched on a number of topics’. However, large amounts of figurative language, whether innovative or conventional, like ‘spill the beans’, ‘a hard life’ or

‘a tough cookie’, contain both an information-reporting component and an affective or evaluative component. Indeed, the listener has a much greater need with figurative language than with ‘literal’ language to be able to tell whether an affective or evaluative component is intended. In terms of production too, the ability to use figurative language to convey one’s standpoint is likely to contribute significantly to a student’s communicative language ability.

The most important thing about ideational functions is that they are used to convey our feelings about that information. The word ‘feelings’

can have a wide range of applications. It can be used to refer to particularly high levels of emotion, feelings of dissatisfaction, as when we are complaining, evaluative comments or political ideology. In this section we will review research which has identified strong roles for figurative language in each of these areas.

Emotions are subjective experiences and, as such, are difficult to capture. Also, they are complex, and figurative language can be used to succinctly express this complexity. Indeed, research has shown that speech addressing topics that are emotional is likely to result in the production of significantly more figurative language (in particular metaphors) than, for example, narratives, statistics and examples (Corts, 1999; Fussell and Moss, 1998; Gibbs and Nascimento, 1996;

Williams-Whitney et al., 1992). There are particularly high instances of figurative language use when people are talking about negative emotions (Fainsilber and Ortony, 1987).

It has been argued that people use overt figurative language to distinguish a particular emotional state from other similar types of states (Fussell and Moss, 1998). These differences may be qualitative and/or quantitative. For example, Fussell and Moss (ibid.) carried out a study in which they asked the participants to look at a series of film clips featuring sadness. Although the literal expressions that speakers used were fairly similar across clips, their idioms and metaphors were tailored to specific clips and to specific points in the characters’ emotional experiences.

They found that people used significantly more metaphors when

categorising specific personal instances of sadness than they did when simply describing sadness in general. These findings are in line with the idea that speakers produce creative utterances to individuate personal emotional experiences from the general concepts encoded in the lexicon (Gerrig and Gibbs, 1988).

Further evidence of the role of overt figurative language in expressing our feelings and attitudes is provided by Drew and Holt’s (1998) finding that people are most likely to employ idioms when they are complaining to, or about, another person.

This reflects a broader view that figurative language is most likely to be found in the context of negative evaluations (Moon, 1998). Findings such as these show that there is a degree of systematicity governing people’s choices of when to use idioms and when not to. A speaker’s decision to choose a particular idiom from their linguistic repertoire will, at some level, either consciously or subconsciously, reflect their subjective positioning. This has also been found in university lectures where the lecturer will use figurative language to convey his or her evaluation of the subject being discussed (Littlemore, 2001b). Littlemore found that international students sometimes missed the evaluative component of the lecture because they had misinterpreted the lecturer’s use of figurative language. For example, when one lecturer suggested that Government policy was going to ‘begin a new chapter’, this was understood by a number of students to mean that there was simply going to be a new version of what went before, rather than a completely new approach. These students had picked up on the wrong part of the source domain, leading them to focus on continuity, rather than change and the lecturer’s enthusiasm for this change.

As well as conveying emotions and evaluation, figurative language, par-ticularly metonymy, is also involved in the interpretation of implicatures and indirect speech acts. It is generally accepted that the identification of a speaker’s communicative intention in an indirect speech act requires some inferential work on the part of the hearer. For example, if there is a cake on the table in the dining room and a visitor to the house utters

‘mmm, that looks good’, the chances are that they are trying to convey the message ‘can I have a piece?’. Speech act theorists rarely discuss the nature of the inferential work involved in interpreting utterances such as these, but recent work in the area of cognitive linguistics suggests that metonymic shorthand may be involved (Gibbs, 1994; Panther and Thornburg, 1998; Perez-Hernendez and Ruiz de Mendoza, 2002).

In order to account for the role of metonymic thinking in under-standing indirect speech acts, Panther and Thornburg (1998) propose a

useful distinction between ‘propositional metonymy’ and ‘illocutionary metonymy’. Propositional metonymy includes both traditional referential metonymy, in which words are used to refer to related concepts (e.g., the White House thinks), and predicational metonymy, in which potentiality stands for actuality (e.g., where they were able to get a small farm in the West stands for they got a small farm in the West). Illocutionary metonymy is what allows people to understand the illocutionary force of indirect speech acts. In the cake example, the utterance ‘mmm that looks good’ stands metonymically for the scenario in which the host offers them a piece of cake, they eat it, and enjoy it. This would be a

‘comment for request’ metonymy. The widely cited utterance ‘it’s cold in here’, which, in certain contexts, means ‘please close the window’, may involve a similar type of ‘comment for request’ metonymy. In a conversation about a possible trip to the cinema, the utterance ‘Star Wars is on’ may be intended to mean ‘let’s go and see Star Wars’, which would constitute a ‘comment for suggestion’ metonymy.

Illocutionary metonymies are likely to be involved in the comprehen-sion of many, if not all implicatures, that is, things that are implied in conversation, but not expressed directly. For example, if someone were to ring up their partner and say ‘I’m standing right outside the fish and chip shop and it smells fantastic – I was wondering if you’d put the dinner on yet’, this might reasonably be inferred to mean ‘would you like me to buy us some fish and chips for dinner?’ If someone asks ‘have we got any biscuits left?’ and receives the reply ‘I don’t know, but Joe was on his own in the kitchen for a very long time yesterday evening’, he or she may well infer that Joe has eaten all the biscuits, so there probably aren’t any left.

From what we have seen just, it is likely that people engage in metonymic thinking in order to understand the contextual clues (Gibbs, 1994). In the fish and chips example given earlier, the listener needs to form a metonymic connection between the fact that their partner is standing outside the fish and chip shop and the fact that he or she wants to know if they have put the dinner on. In the biscuits example, a metonymic connection needs to be drawn between Joe’s presence in the kitchen and the fact that the biscuits may be finished.

Implications for foreign language learning

We can sum up Section 6.2 by saying that figurative thinking is likely to contribute to ideational functions in two main ways. First, we have observed that figurative language is often used to convey emotions and evaluation, particularly negative evaluation, and second, we have seen

that metonymic mechanisms lie behind the interpretation of indirect speech acts. But how can we help language learners to develop their figurative thinking potential in order to acquire both of these skills?

One way of sensitising learners to the role of culture in understanding implicatures (particularly ones that convey evaluation) is through the study of poetry. A poem that makes good use of metonymic shorthand, and which contains language that is easy enough for lower level stu-dents, is ‘Hair Today, No Her Tomorrow’, by Brian Patten (see Box 6.1).

This poem appears to revolve around a simple discussion of a hair, but in fact it is dealing with complex issues of love, hate, jealousy and faith-fulness. Very little is said, but a great deal is implied. This poem could be used to explore the ways in which metonymy acts as a kind of shorthand for both universal and cultural-specific assumptions and schemata. Before reading the poem, students could be asked to conduct an associative group analysis for words such as ‘hair’, ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘bed’. They could be asked to read the title and predict what the poem is going to be about. They could then be asked to identify the metonymic links between the objects referred to in the poem, and the actions and ideas that they encapsulate. They could then be encouraged to reflect upon parallel metonymies in their own language, and on possible cultural equivalents to the ideas expressed in the poem. Another more overarch-ing metaphor that could be exploited is the fact that this poem sets up a kind of tennis match between the two speakers, a pattern that more advanced students could perhaps be asked to imitate.

6.3 The role of figurative thinking in performing