metalinguistic knowledgen
(in language learning) knowledge of the forms, structure and other aspects
of a language, which a learner arrives at through reflecting on and analyz-
ing the language. In linguistic analysis, researchers sometimes make use of
a native speaker’s metalinguistic knowledge as one source of information
about the language.
metaphor n
in traditional literary criticism, a metaphor is distinguished from a simile.
While a simile expresses that two things are similar (The man is as strong as
a lion), a metaphor implies that the two are equivalent (The man is a lion).
Metaphors are important means by which words carry both semantic and
cultural meanings, and each language has its own metaphors that have
accumulated over time and that must be learned by second and foreign
language learners.
In cognitive linguistics, metaphors are not mere poetic or rhetorical
embellishments, but are considered an important part of everyday speech.
The notion of conceptual metaphorrefers to the understanding of one
range of concepts (the target domain) in terms of another (the source
domain), for example, understanding time in terms of space (in the days
ahead of us, the coming month, as we approach the end of the year), the life-
is-a-journey metaphor (with a destination, paths chosen and not chosen,
obstacles to be overcome), or the argument-is-war metaphor (arguments
can be attacked, defended, won, or lost). The question of whether such
metaphors actually affect the ways in which we perceive, think, and act,
a version of the linguistic relativityhypothesis, is the topic of much
controversy.
In systemic-functional linguistics, grammatical metaphor, refers
to the encoding of meanings in grammatically incongruous ways. For
example, while events and processes are naturally expressed by verbs (e.g.
develop, decide) and attributes by adjectives (e.g. effective), all of these can
be remapped as nouns (development, decision, effectiveness) Such gram-
matical metaphors are usually created through the process of derivation.
Grammatical metaphors occur in all varieties of English (and other lan-
guages), but are especially common in scientific and technical writing and
are recognized as a distinctive marker of academic discourse.
see also figure of speech
metaphor analysisn
the study of metaphors used by teachers, learners and others as a way of
identifying the subconscious beliefs and attitudes that underlie consciously
held opinions. Metaphors that are used to describe textbooks, teachers and
metalinguistic knowledge