Abstract
So far, we have focussed mainly on functional and textual aspects of communicative language ability. In this chapter, we turn to an area of language learning whose relationship to figurative thinking may be less obvious, namely that of grammar. Grammatical competence refers to a language learner’s knowledge of, and ability to use the grammatical system of the target language. Of all Bachman’s categories, this is the one that we might expect to be least related to metaphoric competence. However, with recent developments in the field of conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics, it is clear that many of the phenomena that language educators regularly treat as grammatical have a strong metaphoric or metonymic component, though one often needs to look within the lexical item (of, say, phrasal verbs) to find it.
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