The Effect of Cultural Background on Metaphor Interpretation (original) (raw)
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Difficulties faced by international students concerning metaphor
This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those extracts. Among the items reported as difficult, we established the proportion of metaphorical items, plus the proportion of items composed only of words familiar to the students. We developed a measure of the extent of students' awareness of their metaphor interpretation difficulties, plus a scheme for categorizing the most common types of metaphor misinterpretations. We found that, of the items that were difficult though composed of familiar words, 40 per cent involved metaphor. Further, when the students misinterpreted metaphors, they only seemed aware of having difficulty in 4 per cent of cases. As university lecturers use metaphors for important functions, such as explaining and evaluating, such international students may thus be missing valuable learning opportunities. Our error categorization scheme could be used in helping English learners with metaphor comprehension.
To see and appreciate the relationship between metaphor and culture in its complexity, we have to deal with a number of basic issues. By metaphor in this paper, I will primarily mean "conceptual metaphor" that can have a number of linguistic manifestations (see Kövecses 2002. A conceptual metaphor consists of a set of correspondences, or mappings, between a "source" and a "target" domain. The meaning of particular metaphorical linguistic expressions is based on such correspondences.
The interplay between metaphor and culture
The general issue I address in the paper is how metaphor and culture interact. From among the many ways of this interaction, I single out three that I find especially important from a cognitive and cultural perspective. First, I look at how metaphors interact with what many anthropologists call cultural models. Second, I consider the issue of why some conceptual metaphors are universal and why some vary both cross-culturally and intraculturally. Third, I ask what the specific contextual factors are that lead to divergent uses of metaphors in particular discourse situations.
Effects of Metaphors for Asian and Majority-Culture Students
Home Health Care Management & Practice, 2004
Nursing programs have seen an increase in multicultural students entering into the profession. One challenge is that of communicating clearly among groups of people including majority Americans and those for whom English is a second language. This article addresses the effectiveness of metaphors that bridge the gap between a known concept and one that is new to the learner. This study found that students from the majority culture and those for whom English is a second language misunderstand metaphors. Therefore, faculty members who seek to communicate clearly should pay special attention to the use of metaphors. One challenge to the nurse is effective communication, as the client may not yet have acquired the ability to understand common metaphors. The student who has been educated to be sensitive to these concerns will provide better care for these clients.
Metaphors: sources for intercultural misunderstanding?
Over the last two decades, questions of languages’ cultural specificity, diversity, and of linguistic universalism versus relativism, have increasingly been applied to the study of metaphor in analyses that take data from a wide range of languages into account. After reviewing existing research on cross-cultural metaphor variation, this paper focuses on the phenomenon of ‘false-friend metaphors,’ i.e., seemingly identical mappings which reveal hidden culture-specific differences when used in intercultural communication and in contrastive analysis. Examples of this phenomenon are drawn 1) from interpretations tasks concerning the metaphor THE STATE IS A (HUMAN) BODY, and 2) from cross-cultural research on the concept of SOCIAL FACE. In conclusion, a preliminary categorization of types of metaphor-induced intercultural misunderstanding is proposed
Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2015
The focus in this paper is on the kind of metaphors that is pervasive in everyday life and more specifically in everyday literal language; the kind of metaphor that is referred to as "conceptual automatic". In this paper, I explain reasons for having different and similar metaphors across languages by taking the comparison between the Arabic spoken in the western area of the Arabian (WS Arabic) and English as an example. This paper concludes that metaphor similarities or differences between languages could be a result of differences in one or more of the metaphor shaping factors which are: extent of different cultures, geographic environments, speaker's values and personality, thinking modes, mental concepts, views of the world, feelings, and human relationships. In this paper, I emphasize that to arrive at more accurate conclusions when finding out conceptual metaphor similarities and differences, we should not neglect the indirect effect of mainstream languages on nonmainstream ones.
Metaphor Interpretation and Cultural Linguistics
Metaphor use is characterised by conceptual variation that can be explained with reference to culture-specific discourse traditions. Cognitively oriented metaphor analyses that are interested in cultural relativity have so far concentrated mainly on the production side of metaphors and their misunderstanding by ESL learners. This study, by contrast, focuses on variation in metaphor interpretation across groups of ESL/EFL users from 31 cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Its data consist of a questionnaire survey, administered in 10 countries, which gave students the task of applying the metaphor of the “body politic” to one’s home nation. The results show systematic variation between four interpretation models for this metaphor, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, NATION AS PART OF SELF and NATION AS PART OF INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL STRUCTURE, as well as some evidence of elaborate polemical and/or political elaboration. The two main versions, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, were represented across all cohorts but exhibited opposite frequency patterns across Chinese v. Western cohorts, with the former favouring GEOBODY-based, the latter functional interpretations. This finding and the evidence of elaborate metaphor interpretations lead to culture-specific motivations of variation in metaphor interpretation (as well as in metaphor production), specifically with regard to the frequency and distribution patterns of source concepts. Metaphor interpretation analysis can thus contribute to a cognitive metaphor analysis in general and especially to “cultural linguistics” approach to metaphor.
Cross-cultural Communication and Metaphorical Competence
International Journal of Language Studies, 2011
This article examines the aspects of similarity and diversity between different cultures through the cognitive theory of metaphor. The aim is to show that both aspects need to be intertwined for the development of intercultural communication and for solving problems of understanding that can arise in cross-cultural communication. The author used the cognitive theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and Johnson and applied it to a cross-cultural analysis of a randomly selected set of metaphors in Persian and English. The results of the study revealed that there is a certain degree of similarity between the two languages, but several aspects of such metaphors are culturespecific. This underlines the importance of intercultural studies for foreign language teachers.