Discourse Context and the Development of Metaphor in Children

Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metaphor capacity take place in situations in which language is used for personal and interpersonal goals. This paper explores how the discourse context of metaphorical language supports children’s understanding, and examination of classroom data shows how language, situation and interaction all offer assistance to the interpretation of metaphorically-used language. I further argue for a discourse approach to the study of children’s developing metaphor capacity, and identify some of the dimensions of metaphor capacity: knowing when metaphor use or metaphorical interpretation is appropriate, negotiating appropriately rich meanings of metaphor, accessing stored contextualised metaphorical language and meanings, and using metaphor to achieve cognition or affective goals. The implications of a discourse approach for researching metaphor, and for teaching and learning are discussed.