Remembering figurative idioms by hypothesising about their origin

Despite their apparent arbitrary nature, numerous figurative idioms can in fact be taught and learned in an insightful way, as opposed to random and blind memorisation. Controlled experiments in recent years have shown, for example, that learners’ recall of L2 figurative idioms is facilitated by the explicit use of imagery in the presentation stage. This imagery technique can only be fruitful to vocabulary acquisition in the long term, however, if it extends into learner autonomy. A new small-scale experiment was therefore set up to estimate learners’ ability to apply the strategy of imagery processing to figurative idioms independently. One specific imagery technique was put to the test: hypothesising about the origin of L2 idioms. The results were very encouraging both with respect to the feasibility of the task and with respect to its beneficial effect on retention. Introduction Figurative idioms have received considerable attention from a foreign language teaching perspective in recent years (eg Kövecses and Szabó 1996; Lazar 1996; Deignan, Gabrys and Solska 1997; Lennon 1998; Cooper 1999; Cornell 1999). This renewed interest in pedagogical approaches to figurative idioms has undoubtedly been fuelled by the gradual introduction of cognitive semantic metaphor theory (eg Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987) to the fields of applied linguistics (eg Low 1988) and psycholinguistics (eg Gibbs 1993). One of the central tenets of cognitive semantics is that a large proportion of figurative language is ‘motivated’ rather than arbitrary. In this view, many figurative idioms can be traced back to a relatively small set of ‘conceptual metaphors’. For example, the figurative expressions She was fuming; I was boiling with anger; Simmer down; She flipped her lid; He exploded; He blew up at me; She was breathing fire; That remark added fuel to the fire; and so on, can all be related to the underlying conceptual metaphors The body is the container for the emotions and Anger is heat (eg Kövecses 1990). Contrary to the ‘traditional’ view, which considered figurative idioms to be ‘dead’ metaphors that could only be learned through ‘blind’ memorisation, cognitive semantics offers the prospect of more systematic and insightful learning of vast numbers of figurative expressions.