Overt and covert uses of metaphor in the academic mentoring in English of Spanish undergraduate students at five European universities
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Fiona MacArthur
Abstract
Twenty-seven semi-guided office hours’ consultations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. The linguistic data gathered show that metaphor plays a significant role in the way that lecturers explain to visiting Erasmus students how assignments, exams or course contents should be approached and understood. When mentoring their students, lecturers often frame the advice they are giving in metaphorical ways; occasionally this is done overtly, through establishing analogies or non-literal comparisons, but more often it is done covertly, through the use of conventional metaphorical expressions that are not accompanied by words or phrases that signal that the lecturers’ words should be understood as metaphors. This article examines extracts of talk from 5 academic conversations, looking at the different ways that ideas are framed metaphorically and the kind of responses they provoke in a conversational partner. The initial hypothesis was that overt metaphors would be a particularly effective means of communicating an idea in these crosscultural mentoring sessions. However, when we compare this with covert uses of metaphor in the corpus, there is only weak evidence that it is so. Rather, the communicative success of any use of metaphor seems to depend very largely on the way that the conversational partners enact their roles as collaborative participants in an academic conversation.
Abstract
Twenty-seven semi-guided office hours’ consultations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. The linguistic data gathered show that metaphor plays a significant role in the way that lecturers explain to visiting Erasmus students how assignments, exams or course contents should be approached and understood. When mentoring their students, lecturers often frame the advice they are giving in metaphorical ways; occasionally this is done overtly, through establishing analogies or non-literal comparisons, but more often it is done covertly, through the use of conventional metaphorical expressions that are not accompanied by words or phrases that signal that the lecturers’ words should be understood as metaphors. This article examines extracts of talk from 5 academic conversations, looking at the different ways that ideas are framed metaphorically and the kind of responses they provoke in a conversational partner. The initial hypothesis was that overt metaphors would be a particularly effective means of communicating an idea in these crosscultural mentoring sessions. However, when we compare this with covert uses of metaphor in the corpus, there is only weak evidence that it is so. Rather, the communicative success of any use of metaphor seems to depend very largely on the way that the conversational partners enact their roles as collaborative participants in an academic conversation.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Applying Cognitive Linguistics: Identifying some current research foci (figurative language in use, constructions and typology) 1
-
I. Figurative language in use
- Overt and covert uses of metaphor in the academic mentoring in English of Spanish undergraduate students at five European universities 23
- The interpretation of metonymy by Japanese learners of English 51
- Methodological triangulation in the study of emotion: The case of 'anger' in three language groups 73
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II. Constructing meaning in language (L1 and L2 acquisition)
- On-line processing of verb-argument constructions: Visual recognition threshold and naming latency 103
- The role of force dynamics and intentionality in the reconstruction of L2 verb meanings: A Danish-Spanish bidirectional study 133
- Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of boundary-crossing events in L2 acquisition 157
-
III Typology
- Thinking for translating and intra-typological variation in satellite-framed languages 181
- Showing versus telling: Representing speech events in English and Spanish 205
- Subject index 229
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Applying Cognitive Linguistics: Identifying some current research foci (figurative language in use, constructions and typology) 1
-
I. Figurative language in use
- Overt and covert uses of metaphor in the academic mentoring in English of Spanish undergraduate students at five European universities 23
- The interpretation of metonymy by Japanese learners of English 51
- Methodological triangulation in the study of emotion: The case of 'anger' in three language groups 73
-
II. Constructing meaning in language (L1 and L2 acquisition)
- On-line processing of verb-argument constructions: Visual recognition threshold and naming latency 103
- The role of force dynamics and intentionality in the reconstruction of L2 verb meanings: A Danish-Spanish bidirectional study 133
- Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of boundary-crossing events in L2 acquisition 157
-
III Typology
- Thinking for translating and intra-typological variation in satellite-framed languages 181
- Showing versus telling: Representing speech events in English and Spanish 205
- Subject index 229
