Second Language Figurative Proficiency: A Comparative Study of Malay and English

By J. Charteris-Black. 2002

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the potential of cognitive linguistic notions such as conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonym for comparing the figurative phraseologies of English and Malay and anticipating second language learner difficulty. A comparative analysis is undertaken that identifies six types of relationship between figurative expressions in the two languages. It is suggested that identification of linguistic and conceptual similarities and differences in figurative expressions enable us to anticipate the types of problems that may be encountered by Malay-speaking learners of English in the acquisition of English figurative language. A comparative analysis is used to develop a set of production and comprehension tasks that aim to measure figurative proficiency. This is tested with a group of 36 Malay-speaking tertiary learners of English. It is found that figurative expressions with an equivalent conceptual basis and linguistic form are the easiest. The most difficult are those with (1) a different conceptual basis and an equivalent linguistic form and (2) culture-specific expressions that have a different conceptual basis and a different linguistic form. There is some evidence that learners may resort to the L1 conceptual basis when processing unfamiliar L2 figurative language. There is also evidence of intralingual confusion between higher and lower frequency L2 figurative expressions. It is more advantageous to draw learners' attention to the conceptual bases of L2 figurative expressions in circumstances where they differ from those of the L1 than when the conceptual bases are similar (especially where learners' L1 is unrelated to their L2).

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b92564570e1bdea8ac5a460b496466622ef4b92e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. N. Schmitt
2. A. Cieślicka
3. Marijana Macis
4. Ron Martinez
5. A. Siyanova‐Chanturia

In Language and Linguistics

1. Marijana Macis
2. N. Schmitt
3. A. Cieślicka
4. E. Peters
5. Stuart Webb
6. Lars Stenius Stæhr
7. M. Garnier
8. F. Boers

Citations in the corpus

• Not just ‘small potatoes’: Knowledge of the idiomatic meanings of collocations (2017, background): “This kind of misunderstanding can be especially difficult if the idioms have different underlying cultural basis, e.g. a windbag ‘talks too much’ in English would be tong kosong (‘empty bowels’) in Malay (Charteris-Black, 2002).”
• Literal salience in on-line processing of idiomatic expressions by second language learners (2006, background): “…with on-line processing issues but rather with strategies of coping with L2 idioms have likewise emphasized the importance of literal meanings, either of L2 idiom components themselves or of their L1 translation equivalents (see, for example, Irujo, 1986; Bortfeld, 2002; Charteris-Black, 2002).”