Applied Linguistics 27/2: 268–294 ß Oxford University Press 2006

doi:10.1093/applin/aml004

Metaphoric Competence, Second

Language Learning, and

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Communicative Language Ability
1
JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and 2GRAHAM LOW
1
University of Birmingham, 2University of York

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance

as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of
second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability.
In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been
widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely
Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and
learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to
play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute
centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary
competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor
is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from
the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning.

INTRODUCTION
Research into the forms, structure and functions of metaphor has come a
long way in the last thirty years. A number of writers have argued that many
of the research findings have serious implications for second language
teaching and learning (e.g. Alexander 1983; Dirven 1985; Littlemore 2005;
Low 1988), but it has taken a long time for metaphor to make significant
headway into mainstream pedagogical practice and the design of teaching
materials (Kellerman 2001: 182). Even now, there are few commercial
second-language courses which teach metaphor as anything other than
the basis of colourful idiomatic phrases. Rigorous empirical evaluations
of language learning situations or interventions have begun to appear in
the last few years, however, and hopefully the results of these, allied to good
descriptions of how metaphor is used in the real-world contexts in which
learners need to operate, is starting to form the basis of an evidence base for
teaching and learning metaphor and indeed figurative language in general.
The reasons why metaphor, and its close cousin, metonymy, have taken
so long to permeate mainstream language teaching are not entirely clear.
It may be that they are often hard to treat in a clear, rule-governed way.
It may simply be that although Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) seminal
Metaphors We Live By foregrounded conceptual metaphor as something
structured, analysable, and bound up with culture and everyday reasoning,
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 269

it did so largely in the context of conventional language. As most of the

examples were already taught on English courses either as literal language or
as some form of fixed expression, applied linguists may have concluded that
vocabulary could just as easily be taught without any reference to metaphor.

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On the other hand, it may be that metaphors are still felt by some to be
largely literary and thus recondite, obscure, and difficult. According to this
view, metaphor reflects an advanced use by a minority of speakers and there
is little justification for exposing most learners to it. Lastly, a somewhat
cynical view would be that there are currently few proficiency tests for skills
connected with recognizing or using metaphor and what cannot be easily
tested tends not to be taught (Low in press).
The object of this paper is to review the scope of metaphor and metaphoric
competence in the context of second-language teaching and learning. We use
the term ‘metaphoric competence’ in a fairly broad sense, to include both
knowledge of, and ability to use, metaphor, as well as Low’s (1988) ‘skills
needed to work effectively with metaphor’. In order to assess the importance
of metaphoric competence in language education, we make use of a general
model of communicative language ability (Bachman 1990) that has been
employed widely in the design and validation of both teaching and testing
materials. We argue that ‘metaphoric competence’ is far from recondite, and
needs to be seen as playing an important role in all the component parts
of the model. Our aim is not to ‘sell’ any particular theory of metaphor,
but rather to show that metaphor is involved in virtually every area of
language that learners need to use, understand or learn, and that it may
even help their learning of words and expressions which native speakers may
not actively process metaphorically. We begin with a brief overview of
metaphor and metaphorical thinking. Almost all examples will be given from
English, or the English of EFL learners.

METAPHORIC LANGUAGE AND METAPHORIC THINKING

Successful metaphor comprehension and production involves the ability to
understand one entity in terms of another (apparently unrelated) entity. For
example, if the Japanese Government puts taxes on car imports in order to
create a level playing field for Japanese manufacturers, the ‘Japanese car
market’ is temporarily treated as a place where competitive sports are played.
This could be because markets are hard to describe verbally, because the
writer is somehow evaluating the situation, or both. The reader needs to
decide which aspects of a playing field are relevant to the discussion about
cars and whether the sense of the idiom is being extended. A ‘target’ term
like ‘market’ or ‘competition’ may be provided, but the reader may well
have to infer it. Either way, many analysts would argue that two domains
(or ‘semantic fields’) are being brought together, explicitly by the author, or
implicitly by the reader’s inferences; the Japanese car market constitutes the
target ___domain (the semantic field under discussion), whereas the place where
270 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

competitive ball sports are played constitutes the source ___domain (the semantic
field that is being used to describe, understand, or evaluate the target).
At this point it is important to distinguish between linguistic metaphor and
conceptual metaphor. Linguistic metaphor can be seen as words occurring

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in a spoken or written text, which are incongruous in context and appear
to have a more basic sense. ‘Playing fields’ and ‘level’ have little obvious
connection with taxes or car imports, but the incongruity can be resolved by
establishing the implication that horizontality implies no unfair advantage to
either party in a marketing, rather than game, situation (see Cameron 2003:
59–60). The key point about linguistic metaphor is that the words themselves
matter: the choice of ‘level’ not ‘flat’ or ‘good’, or the fact that the three
words all tend to be singular, even where several situations are involved.
Linguistic metaphor thus takes account of the connotations of particular
words and the morphological, syntactic, and collocational characteristics of
the expression. Research is beginning to show that linguistic metaphors tend
to cluster in certain areas of a text, and that they are used to perform a fairly
predictable set of functions (Cameron 2003), but it can also be important to
consider the points in, say, a dialogue, where linguistic metaphors do not
appear (Cameron and Stelma 2005).
With a conceptual metaphor, the words that are used are often of little
interest; what is important is the abstract underlying relationship(s) between
two concepts or entities. With linguistic metaphor the entities may have to be
inferred, but with conceptual metaphor, they almost always have to be inferred,
leading to frequent arguments concerning their optimal specification (see
Kövecses 2000; Grady 1997). Conceptual metaphors can be said to represent
ways of thinking, in which people typically construe abstract concepts such
as time, emotions, and feelings in terms of more easily understood and
perceived concrete entities, such as places, substances, and containers
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). They are conventionally expressed
through an A IS B structure. For example, the conceptual metaphor, THEORIES
ARE STRUCTURES, (‘structures’ constitutes the source ___domain, and ‘theories’
the target ___domain) is conventionally realized by linguistic metaphors such as:
That’s hardly a strong foundation for your theory.
The theory needs more support.
The theory rests on a single rather dubious premise.

It should be noted that in linguistic metaphors it is words like ‘rest on’

that constitute the source, not the hypothesized underlying concept
STRUCTURES.1
Approaching metaphor conceptually has several advantages. First, it
allows for instances of metaphor that are visual, linguistic, or auditory, or
mixtures of the three. Secondly, it allows the analyst to find the metaphor
in conventional expressions, such as phrasal verbs (Kövecses 2000 cites ‘calm
down’ or ‘simmer down’). Thus conventional expressions, such as ‘plan ahead’,
‘keep on working’, or ‘back in the ’60s’, as well as less standard ones like
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 271

‘a career crossroads’, can be seen as instantiating the same conceptual

metaphor PROGRESS THROUGH TIME IS FORWARD MOTION. The
conceptual viewpoint has proved particularly successful in identifying
metaphors underlying abstractions in both basic vocabulary and everyday

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thinking: ARGUMENT is often thought of in terms of WARFARE,
UNDERSTANDING is often expressed in terms of SEEING, LOVE is often
thought of in terms of a PHYSICAL FORCE, and IDEAS are often thought of
in terms of OBJECTS. Lastly, the conceptual approach has brought out
the complexity and systematicity involved in many metaphors, allowing
them at times to be clustered in higher-level models of, for example, anger
(Lakoff and Kövecses 1987). The linguistic approach to metaphor is equally
important, particularly for language learners, as it focuses on the words that
are actually used, and stresses the importance of phraseology and collocation.
In addition to requiring inferences by the listener/reader to establish what
word or concept is being treated as what other word or concept, linguistic,
and conceptual metaphor share the second characteristic of having grey areas
of indeterminacy and involving clines (Cameron 1999). The clines occur
when clearly separate domains or clearly incongruous meanings move closer
together—metaphor merges into metonymy as two domains converge, or
it becomes literal (or just an extension of a more basic sense of a word). ‘This
essay thinks X’ is clearly metaphoric, but is ‘this essay argues X’ or ‘this essay
describes/states/sets out X’? Whichever approach one adopts (linguistic or
conceptual) it is often necessary to operate concurrently on more than one
level. Many advertisements, headlines, jokes, and stories require the reader
to construct not one, but a range of non-metaphorical and metaphorical
senses for the same words (Giora 2003; Low 1988); the context may involve
conventional senses, but the reader may well have to ‘blend’ the source
and target concepts together in very different ways, to create quite new, or
‘emergent’ meanings (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).
In general, however, linguistic and conceptual metaphor focus on different
aspects of metaphor (Grady 1997), although they may interrelate at times,
since a listener may need (or choose) to identify concepts in order to resolve
the incongruity of a linguistic metaphor. Our contention is that, however
much researchers polarize in favour of one approach or the other, language
learners need to operate both linguistically and conceptually.
The very ubiquity of both linguistic and conceptual metaphor suggests
that second language learners may have to make metaphoric connections
between ideas on a regular basis, as metaphoric extensions of word meaning
are likely to account for many of the vocabulary items that they encounter.
For example, the ‘mouth’ of a river, the ‘eye’ of a needle, and the ‘head’
of the company are commonplace expressions representing metaphoric
extensions of parts of the body. Unfortunately for second language learners,
despite some significant areas of overlap, metaphoric extensions of word
meaning such as those listed above often vary significantly from language to
language. For example, in English, we are used to using the word ‘eye’
272 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

metaphorically in expressions such as ‘thread the cotton through the eye of

the needle’ and ‘don’t forget to get the eyes out of the potatoes’, and
metonymically in expressions such as ‘keep an eye on him for me, please’
and ‘he’s eyeing you up’, but we might have difficulty understanding

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someone who, translating directly from French, tells us that ‘she doesn’t
keep her eyes in her pocket’; ‘she’s got the American eye’; or that ‘she’s got
a partridge’s eye’.2 While native speakers may process conventional
expressions in a rapid, automatized way, at times without much active thought
about basic meanings and concepts (Gibbs 1994; Giora 2003), language
learners are in a very different situation. They are frequently unaware of
standard meanings or default senses and thus may spend more time and effort
processing than native speakers (Kecskes 2001). Idioms or ‘dead’ metaphors
(where the non-metaphorical sense of the words cannot be recovered) can be
very much alive if you do not know what they mean, and a translation into
your L1 does not resolve the incongruity. Similarly, trying to construct
multiple levels of interpretation for jokes and headlines is virtually
impossible for learners unless they engage in active metaphoric thinking.
It has been demonstrated that if teachers systematically draw the attention of
language learners to the source domains of linguistic metaphors and
of vocabulary involving metaphor, then the learners’ depth of knowledge for
that language, and their ability to retain it can improve significantly (see for
example, Boers 2000). However, it might be wondered whether learners are
actually able to engage in metaphoric thinking without explicit instructions.
The following extract, where a group of advanced language learners try
to understand the expression ‘skirt around’ suggests that a small amount
of teacher scaffolding can in some circumstances at least, reap rewards
(Littlemore 2004). The learners were Japanese teachers attending a one-year in-
service training course in the UK. They were discussing the teaching of grammar
in English classes and the teacher had used the expression ‘skirt around’ a topic:
Teacher When we’re teaching grammar at lower levels, we
sometimes skirt around the hardest topics
Student A What is ‘to skirt’?
Teacher What do you think it means
Student B Hiding them? [Mimes a skirt shape i.e. starts off
moving hands down from waist to knees and gradually moving
outward, then moves hands round knees about 20 centimetres
away from knees, in a circular motion, following the hem of an
imaginary skirt]
Student C [Looking at Student C’s mime] Go round?
Student D Avoid?
Student B picks up on one of the salient features of a skirt: that it serves to
hide, or cover, what is underneath. He then uses mime in an attempt to
work out the meaning. Interestingly, although this strategy does not appear
to help student B work out its meaning, it does help student C, who suggests
the meaning ‘go round’. Student C appears to have picked up the idea that
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 273

a skirt is an outer-garment and that it goes round the knees. Student D either
picks up the ambiguity of ‘go round’ or else applies the movement to a
journey where going round an obstacle implies avoiding it. Although these
students have not identified the true etymology of the word ‘skirt’, they

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have used what is to them (and probably is now to most native speakers)
the basic sense, and then employed metaphoric thinking to reach an
adequate understanding of the word. It is not known whether these learners
remembered the figurative use of ‘skirt’ in addition to coping communica-
tively. But pedagogical research over the years on the value of learner
autonomy (Benson 2001), reflective periods (e.g. Storch 1998), strategy
monitoring (Cohen 1998), and noticing (Schmidt 1990), all suggest that
helping learners to identify and understand their own metaphoric thinking
processes, and exercise a degree of control over them, is likely to facilitate
both L2 learning and use.
In this introductory section, we have tried to chart a middle course
between significantly different theoretical approaches to metaphor and
suggested that both the conceptual and the linguistic are needed if language
learners are to acquire more than minimal communicative competence in
the L2. We also argue that learners are likely to engage in metaphoric
thinking more frequently than native speakers and that this active mental
and social engagement can be harnessed to facilitate both understanding
and learning. Somehow learners have to acquire two seemingly
opposed skills; they need rapid access to a standard sense in order
to maintain fluency in reading/listening, but at the same time they need
to be able to recover, or hypothesize, metaphoric detail in order to
interpret accurately and appropriately. In order to justify spending class
and individual time on metaphoric thinking, we now need to demonstrate
that metaphor is indeed ubiquitous across all aspects of communicative
competence.

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN COMMUNICATIVE

LANGUAGE ABILITY
In order to discuss aspects of communicative competence, an easily
interpretable classification system is needed. Several models of competence
have been proposed in the last twenty or so years, the most influential of
which form a rough family that we will here call the Bachman Model. The
family derives ultimately from the component-listing approach of Hymes
(e.g. 1971), which was extended for second language purposes by Canale and
Swain (1980) and Canale (1983). The model was then modified slightly for
testing purposes in Bachman’s (1990) Fundamental Considerations in Language
Testing and it this version that we shall use here. The model has been
criticized by Skehan (1998) for not taking enough account of processing,
despite the clearer split between knowledge and action made by Bachman
and Palmer (1996), but Skehan does not offer an alternative which would
274 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

suit our aim here. Douglas (2000) too suggested changes, but his list of
strategic skills is arguable, to say the least, and his substitution of ‘idiomatic
expressions’ for Bachman’s ‘figures of speech’ runs counter to present needs
(Douglas 2000: 35).

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Bachman (1990) takes a broad definition of the term ‘competence’, which
includes, amongst other things, the ability to deal with knowledge-
based components of language that have been isolated as theoretical
areas, such as ‘syntax’ or ‘cohesion’. Speakers draw on their language
knowledge, using a range of strategic skills to link the message appropriately
with the social purpose and situation. The language component is
summarized in Table 1.
Bachman’s only reference to metaphor is the ‘ability to interpret cultural
references and figures of speech’ under sociolinguistic competence. Indeed, this is
the only place in the model where we can see a clear role for metaphor in
general. We shall, however, show that metaphor plays varying but important
roles in all the cells of the model: namely, illocutionary competence, textual
competence, grammatical competence, and strategic competence as well as
sociolinguistic competence. We begin by reviewing the role of metaphor
within its traditional ___domain of sociolinguistic competence.3

Sociolinguistic competence
Bachman’s phrase ‘the ability to interpret cultural references and figures of
speech’ highlights the fact that, in order to understand metaphor, it is
necessary to appreciate the extended meanings and evaluations given by a
specific culture to particular events, places, institutions, or people. It is
often argued that cultures make extensive use of conceptual metaphor

Table 1: The components of language competence

Organizational competence Pragmatic competence

Grammatical Textual Illocutionary Sociolinguistic

competence competence competence competence

Vocabulary Cohesion Ideational functions Sensitivity to dialect

or variety
Morphology Rhetorical Manipulative functions Sensitivity to register
organization
Syntax Heuristic functions Sensitivity to naturalness
Phonology/ Imaginative functions Ability to interpret cultural
graphology references and figures
of speech

Source: Bachman (1990).

 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 275

(Shore 1996; Kimmel 2004), so that a knowledge of shared cultural

references is necessary if one is to understand or produce the target language
with any degree of accuracy (Lantolf 1999).
An example of a production error that is based in cultural transfer comes

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from an essay entitled ‘Fatalism and Social Criticism in Tess of the D’Urbevilles’
written for one of us by an advanced level student on a pre-sessional English
course. The writer wanted to say that no matter how Tess rebelled, she could
not escape the clutches of the hypocritical Alec; she wrote: ‘she is unable to
run away from his palm’. In English, power is systematically treated as a
manipulable entity and being powerful as an embodied activity—involving
catching and holding with the hands. In Chinese, however, the palm is used,
not so much due to an underlying conceptual metaphor, but more to an
idiom alluding to the vain attempt by the Monkey King to escape from the
Buddha’s hand. This difference might also explain why she used ‘run away’,
since you can indeed run away from a person (while you can conventionally
only ‘escape’ their clutches).4
At the level of interpretation, a lack of appropriate background knowledge
can also lead language learners to misunderstand the connotations
of apparently straightforward expressions (Littlemore 2001a, 2003a).
An interesting example of a culturally-based interpretation error comes
from a Bangladeshi civil servant, who was attending a short course on ‘good
governance’ at a UK university, and who heard one of his lecturers quote
Margaret Thatcher’s, ‘I want a revolution in the way in which civil servants
attack their job’. In the post-class written protocol he wrote that he
understood the term ‘to attack one’s job’ to mean ‘be critical of one’s own
performance’, as opposed to the intended meaning of the lecturer, which was
‘to work with more zeal’. Post-class discussion with this student revealed that
in Bangladesh there was currently a campaign for civil servants to critically
evaluate their ability to perform their jobs, which was partly why he had
interpreted the metaphor in this way. He therefore appears to have subtly
mixed the conventional focus on defeating an enemy in ‘attack a person/
their views’ and the negative cultural context of his own organization
(Littlemore 2001a).

Illocutionary competence
Illocutionary competence refers to a person’s ability to understand not simply
the words one is using, but the message that one is trying to convey through
those words. According to Bachman, illocutionary competence can be
divided into four functions: ideational, manipulative, heuristic, and
imaginative. It is somewhat arguable how far, say, manipulating (or sensing
an intention to manipulate) is a pragmatic, discourse-based activity, or
indeed a strategic one, but for the purposes of this paper, we will stay within
the Bachman model.
276 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

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

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used to convey one’s evaluation of a situation, and an inability to understand
the metaphor can lead the listener or reader to completely misinterpret the
evaluation. Some metaphoric expressions just report in a fairly neutral way:
‘She addressed the question of . . .’, ‘He went beyond the advertised topic’, or
‘He awoke a tenderness in her’, but many others, whether innovative or
conventional, like ‘spill the beans’, ‘a hard life’, or the example above, ‘to
attack one’s job’, contain both an information-reporting component and an
evaluative component. Indeed, the listener has a much greater need with
metaphor than with ‘literal’ language to be able to tell whether an evaluative
component is intended. In terms of production too, the ability to use
metaphor to convey one’s standpoint is likely to contribute significantly to a
student’s communicative language ability.

Manipulative functions
The primary purpose of utterances with a manipulative function is to affect
the world around us. They help to get things done, to control the behaviour
of others, to build up relationships. Even at the very simple level of the
language in which commands are expressed, metaphor forms the basis of
a large proportion of conversational utterances which need to be interpreted
as orders: ‘Calm down’, ‘Back off!’ (about an argument), ‘Stop poking your
nose in!’ and the large range of action expletives best summarized as ‘eff off’.
In the calmer world of business writing, we again find evidence of the crucial
role of figurative language in performing manipulative functions. In the
following example, popular business guru Tom Peters uses the metaphor
of a dynamo to recommend a certain type of worker (the ‘dynamos’), to
exaggerate the worthlessness of the average worker (the ‘cruisers’) and to
imply that average workers should be sacked:
Only 10 to 20% [of workers] are . . . dynamos . . . always working to
learn something new . . . continually building their practices in new
and challenging areas. The rest of the partners are ‘cruisers’, who
don’t stand out as special talents. The bottom line: The long-term
success of any professional service company depends on nurturing
a high share of intellectual-miracle-building dynamos. (Peters
1994)
Peters’s use of the word ‘nurture’ clearly implies that a high proportion of
dynamos must be maintained and have valuable resources devoted to them.
The simple fact of ‘not stand[ing] out’ is equated, via the relative clause,
with ‘cruising’, which implies going along aimlessly, slowly or even worse,
pleasurably. As they are also ‘partners’, which is placed just one word away,
the strong implication is that they are failing morally, as well as intentionally.
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 277

The fate of such people is omitted, but ‘a high share’ would seem to imply
that a few can be tolerated and most should be sacked.
The dynamo and cruiser metaphors, supported rhetorically by collocation
and various types of implication, can become highly persuasive. It may be

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that workers have indeed been sacked as a direct result of their managers
reading Peters’s book, in which case, the metaphor has performed both an
instrumental and a control function. The ability to identify metaphors that
serve these functions contributes directly to one’s communicative language
ability.
The converse of the above, the ability not to be swayed by another person’s
use of figurative language, is just as important a part of communicative
language ability. In order to avoid being positioned by the writer, readers
need to identify the conceptual metaphors and metonymies underlying the
arguments. They will then be able to assess their limitations by identifying
aspects of the source domains that do not transfer easily to the target
domains, or even come up with alternative conceptual metaphors and
metonymies.5 There are two important, yet different, aspects to this skill. The
first is to survive in the face of deliberately used metaphor, as where the
White House aides of the Nixon presidency studied by Lerman (1983, 1985)
consistently avoided referring directly to the illegal activities by using a wide
range of metaphoric utterances. A less obvious, but equally important skill,
is to retain one’s theoretical perspective in the face of unintentional but
persistent metaphor indicating the opposite. A good example would be the
task faced by someone reading a recent article in The New Scientist on the
Snowball theory of the evolution of multicellular organisms. The topic is
Darwinian evolution based on chance mutation, but key parts of the text
are full of animacy metaphors, presumably designed to generate impact and
interest (Low 2005). The following are but a sample from the opening page:
What shook the planet out of its primitive complacency and
heralded the arrival of multicellular animals?
each individual cell had to be master of all trades
collaborations of cells shared the load
bodies could . . . adopt inventive new architectures
Muscle cells could move these bodies to new grazing grounds
Sensory cells could warn of danger; and appendage cells could rake
in supplies
his specialisation turned the creep of evolution into a sprint
life invented skeletons
‘the serious business of creating multicellular life’
Source: New Scientist 12 April 2003: 30.
In this sort of situation, both native speaker and learner alike need to be able
to block out the implications of intentionality and attempt to direct change,
and at the same time to interpret the overtones of familiarity, action, and
agentivity as rhetorical devices aimed at increasing interest, excitement, and
readability.
278 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

Manipulative functions can be performed in conversation by picking up on

and extending the metaphors used by one’s interlocutor. Mio (1996) quotes
a televised exchange between a Lithuanian and a Russian representative at
the time of Lithuania’s imminent independence from Russia. The Russian

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representative compared the separation of the two countries to a divorce,
claiming that, as they had been married for such a long time, any separation
would take time and a period of separation was necessary before any full-
scale divorce could be considered. To this, the Lithuanian representative
replied that the two countries were ‘not going through a divorce because we
were never married, Lithuania was simply raped.’ (1996: 136). Mio asserts
that this is ‘a classic case of metaphoric extension’ (1996: 137), in which the
second speaker picks up on the metaphor being used by the first and extends
it, twisting it slightly to lend force to his argument. Mio carried out a further
study, in which he asked listeners to rate the persuasive force of the
extension, compared with that of a response based on an unrelated metaphor
(Lithuania as a prisoner), and a literal response. The extended metaphor was
found to be significantly more persuasive than both. Thus the relationship-
building function and the interactional function can both be served through
metaphor extension.
It may seem somewhat ambitious to expect language students to use
metaphor in this way in the L2, although adults at least will have been
exposed to the fact of metaphor extension in their first language. The
following example involves three Japanese language teachers on an English
for Academic Purposes course at the University of Birmingham in 2002, prior
to starting an MA in TEFL. After having spent some time preparing the
subject, the students were participating in a debate for and against the explicit
teaching of grammar in the language classroom. About five minutes into the
debate, the exchange in Table 2 took place.
The students played with the conceptual metaphor LEARNING A
LANGUAGE IS IMMERSION (IN WATER); immersion was elaborated to
swimming in a pool and extended to include the social activities surrounding
it (including not swimming!). Students on both sides of the debate extended
the basic metaphor in order to strengthen their arguments, making their
utterances serve a strong manipulative function. In our experience, the
spontaneous use of extended metaphors, such as these by non-native
speakers is a somewhat rare occurrence, but there is some evidence that,
with explicit training in the use of extended metaphors, intermediate
students are able to employ them effectively, and to order, in academic
debate (Littlemore 2005).

Heuristic functions
Bachman’s third component of illocutionary competence, the heuristic
function, refers to our use of trial and error, or ad hoc devices, to learn
and teach others about the world around us. Teachers, for example,
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 279

Table 2: Student discussion for and against explicit grammar teaching

Student Position Transcript
taken

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S1 against It is best for the students to be showered in a lot of English
S2 for But we don’t want to throw them in the water
S1 against We are not throwing them in the water, they are just in the
shower
S2 for We need to get them used to the water before swimming
S1 against But grammar teaching is like sitting on the tatami mat, and not
getting in the water
S3 against And there is few [sic] water in Japan, this is why the classroom
atmosphere is more important

will often create ad hoc explanatory analogies to assist learning.

Thus Cameron (2002) reports a primary teacher likening volcanic lava to
‘sticky treacle’ and ‘runny butter’ and Low (1999a) reported a secondary
teacher coining ‘atoms are happy when they gain electrons’ but telling the
students to remember to unlearn it for the exam. Learners working in a
second language are highly likely to have to work out how to cope with
temporary or ad hoc metaphor, and as we show in later, are likely to use it
themselves as a compensation strategy.
In other situations, a metaphor will become inappropriate because
technology has moved on. In this case, a replacement metaphor will need
to be found; thus, physicists are currently unhappy about the prevalence
of the term ‘black hole’, because they have managed over the years to shed
considerable light on the ‘blackness’. The same may well happen in a few
years with ‘string’ theory.
A final heuristic aspect of metaphor is the recognition that individual
metaphors (whether linguistic or conceptual) give but a partial view of any
given topic and that it is therefore quite understandable and ‘natural’ that
multiple metaphors arise. For example, in order to understand the human
brain, psychologists have made use of, amongst others, container, telephone
network, mirror, loom, homunculus, and computer metaphors (Draaisma
2000). Each of these metaphors gives certain insights into the way the brain
might function, but none give the whole picture. In a similar way, political
ideology can be transferred from teacher to student via the use of restricted,
but ideologically loaded metaphors. For instance, the welfare state can be
described as an umbrella or a safety net, depending on one’s political vantage
point. Students following university lectures need to identify, interpret, use,
and evaluate such heuristic metaphors. The Boers (2000) study cited earlier
is also relevant here; drawing university students’ attention to the source
280 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

domains of conceptual metaphors, helped them understand the inferences

and value judgements that the writers wanted to convey. They were then in
a better position to evaluate the value judgements in particular.

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Imaginative functions
Bachman’s fourth component of illocutionary competence is the imaginative
function, which refers to our ability to create and extend our environment
for humorous or aesthetic purposes. This clearly covers virtually all literary or
poetic uses of metaphor, whether in formal literary contexts, conventional
interactive contexts like children’s counting out games and nursery rhymes,
or informal conversational attempts to be witty or funny. Read et al. (1990:
139) found that people using metaphors in their first language were rated
‘more interesting, persuasive, memorable, and having a better command of
language’ than those not using metaphors. This result is interpretable in two
ways, both of which are relevant here. ‘Being metaphoric’ could be treated as
a desirable feature of speech in certain contexts (e.g. being ironic) which
learners could acquire—or at least aspire to. Alternatively, it might be argued
that ‘being metaphoric’ is more an aspect of personal style and as such, some
speakers might actively reject it (Littlemore 2001b). Little is yet known about
the extent to which learners transfer metaphoric preferences from their L1
to an L2, but there seems no inherent necessity for a learner to adopt the
same persona in the L2 (see Lam 2000 for a clear example of identity
modification). Either way, however, learners must cope interpretively with
speakers who use a higher than normal proportion of metaphors in their
speech.6
Creativity is traditionally one of the most daunting areas to teach in a
second language, and it would be helpful if we could find ways of limiting
the fear for both teachers and learners. One of the major contributions to
metaphor and creativity is the demonstration by Lakoff and colleagues
(notably Lakoff and Turner 1989) that very few creative utterances, even in
literature, rely on complete innovation; most are extensions or elaborations
of existing metaphors. We illustrate this with a sentence from John Banville’s
(2000) novel Eclipse. Alexander is a child. His father has died and his
mother’s reaction is to hit him:
Her look immediately afterwards was one almost of triumph. She
lifted her head back and widened her nostrils, like Snow White’s
wicked stepmother, and something came at me out of her
eyes, sharp and glittering and swift, like a blade shown and
promptly pocketed. (Banville 2000: 57)
The conventional elements include: a look traversing space to the person
observed, the travelling entity resembling a dagger (‘a cutting look’, ‘look
daggers at . . .’), and the look hurting the person (‘if looks could kill’). The
unconventional elements are: (a) increasing the impact of ‘swift’ by
transferring it from ‘look’ (‘a swift look’) to ‘eyes’; (b) using ‘came at’,
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 281

which highlights the final part of the look’s journey and does so in
terms used of wild animals or humans making an intentional attack;
(c) elaborating the cutting instrument as a ‘blade’; (d) introducing the idea
of ‘pocketing’ to describe the short-term nature of the look and to

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suggest that the owner still possessed both the look and the accompanying
malice and had it/them available for future use: they were just temporarily
hidden to the view, not finished and gone. The metaphor effects are
supported by the three repetition sequences: the emphatic ‘ands’, the
sibilants in ‘sharp’ and ‘swift’, and the /p/s in ‘promptly pocketed’. Just
twenty words show a highly complex, yet convergent, interplay of
conceptual and linguistic effects.
Other examples can be found in popular economics and business
journalism where the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith has been playfully
adapted to produce expressions such as ‘the invisible hand versus the iron
fist’; ‘does the invisible hand need an invisible glove’ and ‘a green thumb on
the invisible hand’ (Resche 2003).
The main implications for second language learners are that they need
to acquire some understanding of when and where the speaker or listener
is going beyond convention (Low 1988), and that they need to realize
when a speaker’s use of a creative metaphor is breaking new conceptual
ground. Most importantly, they need to understand the reasons why
the speaker has chosen to make such a break from convention. It may
be that he or she simply wants to entertain, or it may be that he or she
wants to get across a much more serious message or opinion. Most
learners will need to deal with extensions and elaborations of metaphor
from the point of view of coping with reading or listening tasks, but if we
are genuinely interested in giving learners power over the L2, then it could
be argued that they should be encouraged to play with conventional
metaphors as speakers and writers, tailoring their solutions, like John
Banville in the extract above, to fit specific contexts or emphasize particular
meanings. How far native speakers accept creativity and language play by
learners, or simply treat it as error, remains unclear (Boers 2004), but on
balance the advantages of playing with the L2 would seem to outweigh the
disadvantages.
The extensive role played by metaphor to perform ideational, manip-
ulative, heuristic, and imaginative functions suggests once more that it may
be beneficial to help learners notice when metaphor is being used in a way
that is unfamiliar to them. A related factor is the extent to which language
learners expect people to use metaphor. As metaphor is often seen by non-
linguists as a ‘poetic’ device, language learners may not expect to hear
it used on a regular basis in more prosaic contexts. It may therefore be
beneficial at a general level to raise their awareness of the ubiquity of
metaphor and to highlight the fact that metaphor is used to perform a wide
variety of functions.
282 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

Textual competence
Textual competence refers to the ability to understand and produce well-
organized and cohesive text in both written and spoken contexts. Rhetorical

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organization refers to the overall conceptual structure of the text, and the
effect this has on the reader or listener. Textual competence also refers
to the use of language conventions to establish, maintain, and terminate
conversations.
We begin by noting the importance of metaphor at the edge of discourse
units. Several studies by Drew and Holt (e.g. 1998) have shown in a very
clear way that people systematically use figurative language to summarize
and close off encounters or to change topics:
Ten lines of dialogue explaining a procedure:
Hugh Yeah I will do. Yeah. That’s great. Mm.
Liz Uh . . . Yeah. Takes a bit of digesting,
Hugh It will do. Yes.
Liz /Still try it/Hehehe!
Hugh You got it, Hehehe
In this example, Liz exclaims that the information will ‘take a bit of
digesting’, presumably to indicate to Hugh that it is time to break off and for
her to spend some time analysing, summarizng, and/or evaluating what he
has just said. The figurative expression tends to be general, almost clichéd,
in nature (one of the few ‘natural’ environments in modern English for
proverbs), and does not continue the argument. As such, the listener
interprets the speaker as disengaging from the argument and asking to end/
change the topic. Low (1997) found very similar uses of metaphor at or near
the boundaries of written text units, with the difference that boundary
frames were often far more elaborate and multiply intertwined than in
speech and that the various functions (like summarizng, evaluating,
disengaging) were at times expressed by different metaphors in the vicinity
of the boundary, rather than being conflated into one single real-time
expression.
Metaphor is also used to help structure the argument within units of text
or talk (Cameron and Low 2004). Koester (2000), for example, found that
figurative language, and particularly metaphor, was consistently used to
signal problem–solution–evaluation patterns in conversation: a common
feature of argumentative text (Hoey 1983). The high proportion of
metaphoric language used to signal problems is, according to Koester, an
illustration of the fact that figurative language often reduces the risk of
evaluation by listeners, by allowing speakers to shelter behind shared values
(Moon 1998). It also allows speakers to discuss emotionally charged subjects
whilst avoiding committing themselves (a point also made by Lerman 1983,
1985). This relates to the ability to use figurative language to interpret and
control hedges, which appeared in Low’s (1988) formulation of metaphoric
competence.
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 283

Grammatical competence
Grammatical competence refers to a language learner’s knowledge of, and
ability to use the grammatical system of the target language. Of all

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Bachman’s categories, this is the one that we might expect to be least
related to metaphoric competence. However, with recent developments in
the field of conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics, it is clear that large
numbers of phenomena that language educators regularly treat as
grammatical have a strong metaphoric component, although one often
needs to look within the lexical item (of say phrasal verbs) to find it.
A number of cognitive linguists (e.g. Langacker 1987) make the stronger
claim that most, or even all, grammar reflects cognitive organization, but
the examples below do not require such an article of faith. The furthest we
go here is to note that, even where a word has undergone considerable
grammaticalization, it can reflect an earlier and more concrete basic sense
(Hopper and Traugott 1993; Bybee et al. 1994). To make the case that
metaphor is centrally involved in at least some of the grammar that learners
need to acquire, we have chosen the areas of demonstratives, prepositions,
and aspect. We assume that most readers will be familiar with ‘grammatical
metaphor’ (Halliday 1985; Halliday and Kirkwood 1999) in which dynamic
processes are metaphorically construed as stable states and frequently
manifested as nominalizations and noun phrases. Although it is beyond the
scope of this article to offer a lengthy discussion of grammatical metaphor,
it does provide us with another example of the role that metaphoric thought
can play in clarifying the link between grammar and cognition.

Demonstratives
The terms ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English form part of a minimal closed set, where
the two items contrast with each other and sometimes with ‘it’ or ‘the’. The
basic literal sense of ‘I’m talking to this guy here’ is that the listener is an
object, which is clearly in existence here and now, of considerable current
relevance, highly visible, and tangible. On the other hand, ‘I’m trying to talk
to that guy over there’ positions the listener as more distant, less visible
(invisible and thus seemingly non-existent, if distant enough) and of
considerably less current relevance. The literal meaning of the demonstra-
tives thus appears to relate to an idealized and bounded conversation space
(Clark and Clark 1977). Sentences such as the following are not easily
explained in terms of this literal sense, however, unless metaphor is invoked.
(1) After eating: ‘That was really good!’
(2) Back reference in speaking: ‘Let’s go out.’ ‘Yes that’s a good idea.’ Versus
back reference in writing. ‘He suggested going out. We thought this
would be a good idea.’
(3) Oh that (awful) woman/man!
(4) Joke: ‘There was this Englishman . . .’
284 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

(5) Phone: Is that John? No it’s Peter.

(6) Noise: Who’s that?
(7) Introduction: ‘Peter, this is John!’

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Physical distance is used to flag non-existence (‘finished and gone’) of food in
(1) and speech—as apart from writing—in (2). The complaint and the joke
introduction use physical distance to signal psychological rejection in (3), or
to force a sense of familiarity on the listener in (4). In the phone response
(5) and the cry in the dark (6), there is actual physical distance, but also
a strong sense of the unknown, and the psychologically unfamiliar, or
threatening. In the social introduction (7), ‘this’ does indicate familiarity, but
it also acts as a performative, to create social acceptance (or in effect, social
existence within the conversation group).
In sum, if metaphor is allowed, all seven examples above can be accounted
for in a very straightforward manner, as metaphorical distancing from an
idealized conversation space. What is more, the mechanisms invoked are, in
our experience at least, extremely easy for a teacher to teach, or a learner to
comprehend. Metaphor is not only relevant, but its use permits a ‘human-
sized’ account of an otherwise highly abstract or arbitrary system
(Low 1992). It is, these days, a commonplace to note that metaphor
frequently involves ‘embodiment’ (Gibbs 1999, 2003), and the above uses of
human bodies and closely associated experience and behaviour do serve
to illustrate one sense of embodiment. Given the earlier discussion about
metaphoric thinking, it might be felt that native speakers do not ‘think’
much when choosing or using these terms and that ‘thought’ is restricted
to a teacher offering an explanation to learners. However, it will be noted
that variations on (1) to (7) are perfectly possible (e.g. ‘There was that
Englishman . . .’) and the listener needs to establish quickly whether the
speaker is indicating an evaluation, or whether the use of the demonstrative
alters the illocutionary function of the utterance (e.g. not flagging a joke).

Prepositions
Prepositions and particles represent a traditional and recurring nightmare
for all learners of English. Inasmuch as prepositions generally act as the
dependent item in phrases, it is reasonable to treat them (as most EFL
coursebooks do) as essentially grammatical phenomena. There has been much
research in the last twenty years into the way that the different senses of
prepositions are frequently not unrelated, but are rather, orderable, in a
straightforward manner, away from one or more prototypical sense. The
movement from sense to sense can often be accounted for in terms of simple
___location/position extensions, or of application of the same conventional
metaphors that underlie much English vocabulary. Thus ‘I’ll be there inside
an hour’ involves a unit of time being treated as a ring or a box whose edges are
the time concerned—similar to the conversation space in ‘This is John’ (above).
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 285

Or again, if the TV is ‘on’ it is physically active and if you are ‘turned on’ you
are psychologically active, if you are feeling ‘off (colour)’ you are physically or
psychologically not your usual self and possibly ‘off work’.
There is a suggestion, from Boers and Demecheleer’s (1998) study

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involving ‘beyond’ and ‘behind’, that teacher accounts of prepositions having
extended metaphorical meanings can facilitate L2 learning. Boers and
Demecheleer also suggest that, when teaching prepositions, language
teachers should not just sequence teaching from the literal to the extended,
but could also usefully employ clines in the form of clusters of three or four
sentences:
(8) You can’t see Snowdon from here, it’s over there, beyond those hills.
(9) We cannot buy this house: it’s beyond our means
(10) His recent behaviour is beyond my understanding
(11) The use of English prepositions is beyond me.

It remains controversial how far researchers or indeed teachers wish to

accept the conceptual position that ‘in five minutes’ or ‘on time’ are
metaphoric (Goatly 1997; Hunston, personal communication), but it is hard
to explain ‘inside an hour’ or ‘off work’ any other way. The Boers and
Demecheleer study suggested that actively thinking about prepositions as
metaphoric facilitated short-term learning for some university-level students,
at least. Whether younger or less proficient learners would find the notions
more problematic remains unclear.

Tense/aspect
All learners of English need to understand and use ‘will do’ and ‘going to do’.
However, the two can be extremely hard to differentiate, and, to this end,
we suggest that metaphorical senses are worth establishing,
First, we note that the original, and still the basic (although not the most
frequent), meaning of ‘I am going to York’ is that I am ‘on a path towards
York’. In the case of future aspect, the future is metaphorically an entity and
I am moving towards it. Secondly, we may note that ‘will’ has several senses,
starting historically with ‘desire’ and extending metaphorically through
‘willingness’ and ‘expectation’, to its most recent meaning of ‘instruction’
(Tyler and Evans 2001; see also Palmer 1986). This simple distinction allows
us to account for the otherwise hard to explain difference between:
(12) If we invest in this project, we’ll lose all our money.
(13) If we invest in this project, we’re going to lose all our money.

The phrase ‘we’re going to lose all our money’ can be treated as positioning
us metaphorically on a path that currently exists, on a trajectory towards
bankruptcy. The implication is that the metaphorical ‘downward path’
is already happening—or at least the future signs are already visible. The
‘will’ in ‘we’ll lose all our money’ involves no such positioning, however.
286 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

It simply involves an expectation, or prediction, that bankruptcy will

definitely occur. The implication is therefore that the speaker in ‘we’re going
to’ is somehow more emotionally committed, or involved in the outcome.
The speaker in ‘we will’ is being more clinically objective.

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In this section we have shown that metaphor is involved in a range of
grammatical phenomena which learners of English need to be able to
understand and use. We have also tried to suggest that the explicit use
of metaphor by teachers can offer simple, comprehensible ‘human-sized’
accounts in place of arbitrary or complex theoretical grammatical ones.
Moreover, since grammar is rarely a topic of great interest to learners,
explicit appeal to metaphor might also serve to motivate and engage them
more than at present. Some language educators have gone even further;
Holme (2001, 2003) for example has attempted to use the underlying
schemata of journeys and spaces to help learners arrive at tense/aspect
markers through direct bodily experience. Embodiment thus becomes the
driving and triggering force for learning grammar, as well as passively
accounting for it. The pedagogical possibilities are intriguing, and there is
evidence from Lindstromberg and Boers (2005) that Total Physical Response
techniques can facilitate the learning of verbs of movement, but what is now
needed is solid research evidence that experiential instruction can aid the
learning of grammar.

Strategic competence
The second major dimension of the Bachman model and the final area
where metaphoric thinking may play a role is ‘Strategic competence’. Recent
reformulations of the Bachman model have isolated a series of five very
general, non-linguistic skills, such as evaluating (a situation, task, or
response), deciding whether to respond, planning what would be needed
to achieve an adequate response, and organizing the ‘elements of language
knowledge’ to do it. The last skill was added by Douglas (2000), although
how far it can be said to be non-linguistic is somewhat arguable. Concepts
such as ‘evaluating’ and ‘planning’ are too general for a meaningful
discussion about how language users handle metaphor to achieve their
intentions, so we will focus instead on the earlier formulation, in terms of
‘communication strategies’.
There are two principal approaches to looking at strategic competence in
terms of communication strategies: the ‘psycholinguistic’ approach and the
‘interactional’ approach. Proponents of the psycholinguistic approach tend
to define strategic competence as speakers’ ability to use strategies to
compensate for gaps in their knowledge of the target language, in order,
for example, to keep a conversation going (see, for example Poulisse 1990).
These strategies are generally referred to as ‘compensation strategies’ (Tarone
1983: 62). Proponents of the interactive approach, on the other hand, focus
more on the ability of two interlocutors to manipulate the conversation and
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 287

to negotiate shared meaning (see, for example, McNamara 1995). We would

argue strongly that metaphoric thinking has an important role in both
compensatory and interactional aspects of strategic competence.

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Compensation strategies
Compensation strategies include circumlocution, paraphrase, word coinage,
and transfer from the L1, and of these, word coinage and paraphrase are
often metaphorical in nature.
The strategy of word coinage involves making up new words or expressions
to get one’s meaning across. In order to do this, speakers often use or adapt
words that are available to them in original or innovative ways in order to
express the concepts they want. This process often relies on metaphorical
thought, as it involves the ability to stretch the conventional boundaries of
word meaning. The use of metaphorical thought to fill lexical gaps created
by the emergence of new semantic fields has been central to change and
development in language. For example, recent attempts to introduce private
sector thinking into the British public sector have given us ‘ring-fenced
budgets’, ‘beacon authorities’, ‘joined-up Government’, and ‘one-stop shops’.
Another example is the plethora of metaphoric terms describing aspects of
computing. Indeed Dirven (1985) contends that metaphorical processes
account for the majority of meaning extensions of lexical items.
The tendency of native speakers to extend the meaning of words to
describe concepts for which they lack the appropriate vocabulary has been
well documented (Clark 1981, 1982). Clark cites cases where children have
used words such as ‘sleeper’ for ‘bed’, ‘darking’ for ‘colouring in’ and so on
(Clark 1981). She maintains that lexical extension by means of metaphor is
one of the main strategies used by young children to learn their native
language (Clark 1981). Children are thought to use two mechanisms for
creating new words: combining morphemes and changing word meaning (Elbers
1988). It has already been established that the changing of word meaning
is a metaphoric process, but Elbers argues that the process of combining
morphemes is also metaphoric in nature. She cites as evidence word coinages
such as ‘moon-nuts’ (for ‘cashew nuts’) and ‘car-milk’ (for ‘petrol’).
In many ways, the lexical innovations that are made by children in their
L1 are similar to the word coinage strategies used by second language
learners when faced with gaps in their knowledge of the L2. Tarone’s (1978)
example of an L2 word-coinage strategy where the word ‘airball’ was used
to approximate the word ‘balloon’ is exactly the kind of utterance that one
might expect of a child learning his/her L1. This strategy is said to occur
‘when learners stretch the semantic dimension of the vocabulary that they
already possess’ (Kumaravadivelu 1988: 311).
Research by Kellerman (1977, 1983, 1995) has shown that there are
constraints on transfer (or ‘cross-linguistic influence’) strategies from the L1;
there is a higher chance of adapting an L1 phrase if the two languages are
288 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

perceived by the learner as typologically close, but a lower chance if it

is perceived as being specific to the L1 culture, or just generally ‘opaque’
(see also Littlemore 2003b).
The second communication strategy, paraphrase (of an existing or known

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term), often involves metaphoric comparison. For example, when asked
to convey the target item ‘peacock’, a university student said that ‘it has
spots on its wings that are like eyes’ (Littlemore 2001c). Other examples
included ‘a pipe for elves to smoke’ (target item ¼ acorn), ‘chewing gum’
(target item ¼ slug), ‘like a lit candle’ (target item ¼ squid), and ‘like a
helicopter’ (target item ¼ dragonfly).
As long as students are able to signal their use of such expressions
appropriately, their use should increase both their fluency and their overall
communicative effectiveness, enabling them to use their language resources
in order to express a wider variety of concepts.

Interactional strategies
An interactional strategy, in a very broad sense, is a way of shaping spoken
or written text so that it realizes the purposes of the speaker (or writer). This
may simply be an attempt to keep a conversation going in a certain way,
as in the use of figurative expressions to negotiate a change of topic (Drew
and Holt 1998), or it can be the use of complex metaphoric boundary frames
in written texts. One framing strategy noted in Low (1997, 1999b) and
Cameron and Low (2004) for written journalistic articles consists of starting
a text with a metaphor that relates to the topic of the article, but finishing it
with a different metaphor: one based on the title and with a degree of
animacy or humanity. A good example of this comes from a short technology
article in The Economist, which starts with two related food metaphors and
ends with a squid one
What the SQUID did
Think of a freezing cold sandwich with the thinnest of fillings.
It is not an appetising thought; but understand it and you know,
more or less, how a superconducting quantum interference device
(SQUID) works.
...
Cheap, small SQUID magnetometers may yet come swimming
out of the laboratories.
Source: The Economist 11 June 1988: 129 (Cited in Farrell 1988)
In order to position readers of an explanatory text, metaphor is frequently
used in combination with other devices, such as referring to people and their
actions, giving direct quotes, making jokes, or being ironic. The reader is
made to feel that, despite a lack of expertise, he or she can deal with the
topic. Interestingly, writers may alter the positioning of the reader as
the text progresses (van Langenhove and Harré 1999). In the SQUID article
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 289

(above) outlining recent research in electronics and the Josephson sandwich,

the author begins by discussing edible sandwiches, their appetising nature,
and their fillings. This is done in combination with interactive devices like
imperatives (‘Think of’) and direct address to the reader (‘you know’).

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However, as the reader starts to understand the topic, ‘sandwich’ is
demetaphorised at several points, notably by manipulating collocations away
from edible concepts and by removing the direct appeals to the reader. The
result is that ‘sandwich’ is used as a neutral technical term.
Metaphor has also been observed as a strategic tool in specialist discourse.
Cameron, in her (2002, 2003) discussion of the primary teacher talking
about volcanic lava (see ‘sticky treacle’ example above) noted how the
teacher took care to introduce the basic sense of the argument about lava
to the children before the metaphoric expressions were used and to use two
metaphors which came at the topic from slightly different angles, but which
together focused attention on central aspects of what was being taught
(unlike a science book Cameron also examined). The teacher systematically
used metaphor as one part of a method of presenting explanations in
classrooms which was tailored to the audience.
Strategic competence would not appear to be functionally isolated from the
other competences. For example, in The Economist text the author is not just
interacting with the readers, but is evaluating something and trying to
convince the readers to adopt a particular view of themselves or the content.
Strategic interactive functions are thus closely entwined with the evaluative
and manipulative functions of Bachman’s illocutionary competence (section
3.2). Moreover, the need for readers to come to terms with the framing, or
edge effects, in The Economist text illustrates a further connection between
interactional strategic competence and Bachman’s textual competence
(section 3.3). We conclude that, ultimately, a surprisingly large amount of
metaphorical language is used with various types of strategic aim in both
spoken and written text.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS
In his 1988 article, Low attempted to set out a series of skills that learners
needed to master if they were to attain real skill with a second or foreign
language. This was described as ‘metaphoric competence’. While such a
portrayal was of interest to metaphor scholars, it failed to connect with the
broader frameworks of skill and ability standardly used by language teachers,
testers, and researchers. In the present article, we have tried to expand
the 1988 paper and show how metaphoric language and thought play
a significant, indeed key, role in all the areas of competence noted in the
Bachman model, namely sociolinguistic, illocutionary, textual, and gram-
matical competence (or knowledge), and strategic competence. We have
moreover done so using examples both of learners acquiring and using a
second language and of native speakers ‘setting up’, intentionally or not,
290 METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE ABILITY

the communicative obstacles that learners need to overcome. Our evidence

has also highlighted a number of ways in which learners can control, or fine
tune, their responses to the situation and to their own personalities; control
over metaphor thus represents an important way in which learners can

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develop a ‘voice’ in the second language.
As much recent second-language oriented research into metaphor has
emphasized vocabulary (knowledge and skills in the experiments by Boers
and colleagues, cognitive linguistic relationships in Pütz et al. (2001) and
Achard and Niemeier (2004), and intercultural differences in Charteris-Black
(2002), Kövecses (2003), and Deignan (2003)), we would propose that future
research looks particularly at the more neglected discourse-related areas
of illocutionary and strategic competence; learning about words is not the
same as learning to use them or deciding whether one is being manipulated,
and control over metaphor is one of the essential tools for empowering
learners to cope successfully with native speakers.

Revised version received February 2006

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Philip King, Daniel Malt, Rosamund Moon and Sophia Skoufaki for discussing
aspects of the paper with us and for commenting so helpfully on the various drafts of it.

NOTES
1 Contrary to standard practice, we use 3 The taxonomy of language knowledge
the labels ‘source’ and ‘target’ here for proposed by Grabe and Kaplan (1996:
both linguistic and conceptual meta- 220–1) does, in fact, include ‘Tropes
phors, with the proviso that they and figures of expression’ and
represent words in the first case and ‘Metaphors/similes’ under ‘Syntactic/
inferred underlying concepts in the structural knowledge’, but their exclu-
second. This is purely to aid read- sion from ‘Basic syntactic patterns’
ability. For the same reasons, we talk and ‘Preferred formal writing struc-
of ‘domains’ in both cases, meaning tures’ would seem to suggest that they
‘semantic field’ for linguistic are not intended to impinge much on
metaphors and ‘conceptual (e.g. grammatical ability below clause level.
schema-based) links’ for conceptual 4 There are other linguistic expressions
metaphors. The reader is referred to in Chinese that would imply an
the discussion in Heywood et al. underlying metaphor (or metonymy)
(2002), Semino (2005), and Heywood of POWER IS HAVING STRONG
and Semino (2005) on problems with HANDS, but a very informal poll of
domains in metaphor identification. Chinese graduate students by one
2 ‘ne pas avoir les yeux dans sa of us suggested that some at least
poche’ (¼ to be observant); ‘avoir (including the writer of the essay
l’œil américain’ (¼ to have a quick when interviewed) perceived this
eye) ‘un oeil-de-perdrix’ (¼ a corn or expression differently, retaining its
callus). folktale/religious overtones.
 JEANNETTE LITTLEMORE and GRAHAM LOW 291

5 Lakoff (1996) makes much the same multiple raters, have tended to
point in his extensive treatment of show an average metaphor rate
American conservative political of about 10–15 per cent. Several
language and reasoning. of the results are accessible on http://

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6 The texts of spoken and written www.let.vu.nl/english/research/
discourse examined by the Pragglejaz projectSites/pragglejaz/start.htm
group, and using identification by

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