Conventional metaphorical expressions, such as “John attacked Mary’s idea”, are widely used by native speakers in everyday language and have received extensive attention in theoretical semantics and cognitive linguistics. However, how a second language learner can acquire those expressions is left largely unknown.While a great number of linguistic works have focussed on the acquisition of other conventionalised figurative expressions such as idioms, phrasal verbs and proverbs, few systematic studies investigate the acquisition of conventionalised metaphorical expressions when metaphors are not taught deliberately. It remains a question to both researchers and language learners: if one has acquired the literal meaning of a word, can they automatically derive the metaphorical meaning of the same word?This book provides the answer by placing the question of acquisition of metaphorical expressions in the framework of bilingual lexicon. Focussing on the question of whether metaphorical expressions are taken for granted by second language learners, it explores how the metaphorical meaning(s) of a word should be connected in a learner’s mental lexicon, and how the cross-linguistic availability of a metaphorical expression could affect the outcome of acquisition of that expression. It also provides a detailed comparison between metaphorical expressions and other figurative language from both the theoretical and experimental perspectives.

Acquiring Metaphorical Expressions in a Second Language: Performance by Chinese Learners of English PDF

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