Teaching the Language and Structure of Metaphor

Abstract

The last chapter looked at how we can encourage a more creative attitude to language among students. In doing so, it took the traditional view that metaphor represented a different or unusual use of language, and used this assumption to encourage students to play more freely with meanings. That play was constructed around a copula model of metaphor. A copula metaphor is one constructed using the copula verb, ‘be’ or ‘become’ in English. Thus ‘Juliet is the sun’ or ‘Beauty is a flower’ are copula metaphors. I used this kind of metaphor because it is useful for revealing the properties of all other types, both to teachers and students. But there are three main problems with treating copula metaphors as central or prototypical: they are rare relative to other kinds of metaphor; they may falsify our conception of metaphor by using an atypical form to identify how metaphor works and what it consists of; and many languages cannot make copula metaphors because they do not have a copula verb, yet metaphor itself is universal. The first problem is that even in a copula language such as English, copula metaphors are probably not common. Brooke-Rose (1958) and Cameron (1997) in an examination of spoken data, found that, in English, verb metaphors occur more frequently than the noun type.