Lexis Seven

1. He sleeps like a baby 

He wakes up screaming every three hours having pissed himself.

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress…

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“In personification, human properties are attributed to inanimate objects.”

We’re going to talk about the pathetic fallacy without mentioning The Selfish Gene? Even in the face of this –

“…[an] important skill is to retain one’s theoretical perspective in the face of unintentional but persistent metaphor indicating the opposite.”

(Littlemore and Low 2006, p277)

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“…grammatical words, especially prepositions, can also be metaphorical…”

I catch up on reading during the occasional free period at work. In one of those curious little ironies that aren’t really ironies but just coincidences (See Mr. Byrne above) just as I was reading the above sentence a colleague asked me about a sentence regarding Bill Gates.

I forget the exact phrasing, but it involved Bill gaining from what he did with his free time (playing with computers) as a youngster. My colleague wanted to know if you could replace the italicized ‘with’ with either ‘in’ or ‘during’ and what the difference was. I explained that ‘time is money’ and we worked it out from there. If nothing else it’s reassuring to see this course paying practical dividends in the workplace so swiftly.

  

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“When we discuss metaphors in English and the cognitive links between them, we are discussing how English speakers conceive aspects of life – or how English causes its speakers to think of life in particular ways.”

“Causes”? That’s a pretty bold claim to be throwing about in such an offhand manner. I hope we’re going to return to that at some point.

2. Told you

I’ll refer you back to the essay I posted a couple of weeks back, especially with regard to this quote from Carter – “Scientific theories, legal reasoning, myths, art and a variety of cultural practices exemplify many of the same figurative schemes founf in everyday thought and language” (p 144, emphasis added).

* * * * *

“…a somewhat cynical view would be that there are currently few proficiency tests for skills connected with recognizing or using metaphor and what cannot be easily tested tends not to be taught.”

              (Littlemore and Low 2006, p269)

Dunno about ‘cynical’. Seems about right to me.

I’m also curious about the implications of the assertion that, “there seems no inherent  necessity for a learner to adopt the same persona [as in their L1] in the L2 (ibid p280). I know quite a few functionally bilingual people and, with one notable exception, they all seem like slightly different people when using their different languages, and in consistent and identifiable ways. It’s a phenomena that repeats itself so often I’m unwilling to put it down solely to my and their varying levels of fluency.

* * * * *

“…it would seem to be possible to devise instructional programmes for developing such [metaphorical discourse] skills without too much difficulty.”

(Low 1988, p135)

Hmmmm. The devil, as ever, is in the details.

  

3. Apologia 

The notes for this (and the upcoming ones for SL4 as well, I think) are a little brief and, frankly, all over the shop. They’re big, important topics, is why, and it’ll take a very specific angle for me to be able to narrow it down to something more manageable. The metaphor assessment question is one of the ones on the shortlist and I’m sorely tempted to really start drilling down on this, as much for the educational aspect as the evaluation. Got a couple more weeks before committing though…

4. And Finally…

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Also, WAR IS WAR.