Cognitive View On Metaphor And Vocabulary Learning

In traditional view, metaphor is only envisaged as linguistic phenomena, and is a rhetorical or poetic device. Both comparison view and substitution view claim that metaphors are used chiefly for poetic and ornamental emphasis and are a fund of semantic deviation. In modern view, metaphor is far more than a linguiatic phenomenon. It is a basic human thinking way or cognitive process and it is pervasive throughout everyday language structuring not only how we talk, but alio how we think and act, and most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature (Lakoff & Johnson,1980:4) . As such, it is also a topic of considerable relevance to foreign language learning. Language is a product of human cognition. It is of great importance and necessity to study the role of metaphor in foreign language learning and teaching. Unfortunately, little of the research has been developed in this area. My paper is intended as a trial to develop a metaphorical cognitive approach to aid the learner of English as a foreign 'language, especially in vocabulary learning since it has been a big problem in foreign language learning area. The theoretical base of my paper is from Krashen's comprehensible input - comprehensible output. I focus on comprehension of polysemy and idioms (input) and production of expressions or collocations (output). Through an experimental study of metaphorical motivation, it shows that metaphor plays a positive role and produces better results than the traditional approach in vocabulary learning. The conclusion is that the metaphor approach is a powerful strategy in vocabulary comprehension, retention, and production. Teachers and researchers must shoulder the responsibility to carry out close examinations of linguistic metaphors instantiating the underlying conceptual metaphors by analyzing and establishing corpora to better established metaphor systems and discover new metaphor systems, and help learners develop their metaphorical competence applied to both vocabulary learning and other aspects of foreign language learning.