RESENHA REVIEW
Resenhado por Vera Lúcia Menezes de Oliveira e Paiva
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais/CNPq/FAPEMIG
Key-words: metaphor; language in use; corpora; education.
Palavras-chave: metáfora; linguagem em uso; corpora; educação.
ZANOTTO, Mara S.; CAMERON, Lynne; CAVALCANTI, Marilda C. (Eds.) (2008). Confronting metaphor in us: an applied linguistic approach. Amsterdan/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
Reviewing Confronting Metaphor in use is a real challenge, given that one of its chapters deals with metaphors in book reviews. Low, in Chapter 4, investigates twenty reviews in Linguistics, Economics and Chemistry and defends that "reviewers consistently claim a position of authority, asserting or implying that they are well-read, up to date, experienced, a member of the relevant research community and/or having relevant expertise" (p. 95). He also points out that metaphors contribute to "flag reviewer expertise and status" (p.96). His article forces me to identify myself as someone who is coming back to metaphor studies and that is eager to know about the new trends in this research field. I must also say that I am highly influenced by cognitive studies in a dialogue with complexity theory. I hope my metaphors do not deny the way I position myself in this review.
It is a good surprise to find out a book which gathers together scholars from Europe and Brazil to offer us a broad view of metaphor studies. From an applied linguistics perspective, the focus of this collection of research reports is language in use. In the introduction, the reader is warned by the editors that "[I]t is timely for researchers to approach metaphor as social and situated, as a matter of language and discourse, and not just as a matter of thought". As one who looks at the phenomenon in the light of complexity, I could not agree more, and the word "just" in "and not just as a matter of thought", makes all the difference. It shows that the editors recognize that metaphor is also a matter of thought. On reading the research reports, we infer that linguistic social practices and thought are inseparable parts of the same phenomenon.
Having positioned myself, let me introduce the book. It is divided into four parts. The first deals with the nature of metaphor in use and the four chapters focus on stability and variation. In the first one, Zanotto and Palma investigate the indeterminacy of metaphor by resorting to Zanotto's previous case studies compared to other more recent ones carried out by both authors separately. The same poem is used with six different groups, from 1984 to 2003, and in all those studies the data were collected by means of Group Think-Aloud as a reading activity in classroom. Although the authors demonstrate that metaphors display indeterminacy, they are cautious in their conclusions on what concerns the type of indeterminacy which characterizes the multiple reading outputs in their data.
Shifting from literature to educational discourse and conciliation talk, Cameron's approach focuses upon metaphor in conversation with the aim to show changes and adaptations undergone by metaphor in "the dynamic flux of language use". It is her contention that the multiple uses of a metaphor Vehicle term "are both derived and constrained by speakers' experience of the world, their socio-cultural contexts, and their discourse purposes" (p.61). Her study and also Zanotto and Palma's, besides others in the book, are good proofs that from a complex system perspective, discourse could not be separated from other components of language.
Talking about sociocultural environment, Boers and Stengers, in the last chapter of this part, study idioms in three different languages: English, Dutch and Spanish. They present evidences to prove that "at a conceptual/semantic level the lexical composition of metaphorical idioms in a language is fuelled by the lexical fields of source domains that have been especially salient in the culture behind that language" (p. 67).
The second part Examining metaphor in corpora is also made up of four chapters using corpus techniques, an innovative approach in metaphor studies. Koller works with 210 articles in a corpus of business magazine and newspaper texts on marketing, published between 1996 and 2001, and analyzes the data with the help of WordSmith Tools 3.0. The results reveal the predominance of WAR metaphors and the emergence of RELATIONSHIP metaphors in marketing discourse. Koller wanders if the last represents a shift in conceptual models in a context of socio-economic change. In chapter 6, Berber-Sardinha uses corpora techniques to investigate metaphor probability in Brazilian corpora: one corpus made up of 14 conference calls and a general one. His study points out how pervasive metaphor in language use is and defends that probability studies could help ranking word senses in dictionaries. In a different approach, Deignan, in chapter 7, defends corpora studies against isolated sentences analysis, proving through the study of the "argument is war" metaphor that decontextualized language can lead researchers to misleading explanations. On the same track, Vereza (chapter 8) presents arguments to show the advantages of naturally occurring data over isolated sentences. She works with "the metaforicity of "war" through its most frequent collocates" and shows that a larger database gives support to "more solid conclusions".
In the last two parts, we can find 7 chapters altogether, one part dealing with metaphor in education context and the second part, with metaphor in other professional contexts. There is, however, a difference in research methodology between those two sections as the two chapters in part III, Understanding metaphor in language education, use quantitative methodology: the first reports a study testing figurative capacity of monolingual primary school children and the second presents a study with 47 post-graduate overseas students at the University of Birmingham guessing the meaning of 10 vocabulary items contextualized in sentences.
In the last part Using metaphor as a tool in professional development four Brazilian researchers talk about professional development by analyzing metaphors in narrative, chat, email, questionnaire, interview, and oral presentations. Telles interprets the metaphors of a female school teacher's narrative about her professional development; Cavalcanti and Bizon investigate how metaphors are used by in-service teachers of Portuguese to elaborate difficulties in online interaction during an online course about introduction to research; and Liberalli discusses "metaphors and metonymies used by teachers to talk about their school communities" (p.267). Closing the book, Freire examines five workers' experiences with emails in three different management contexts. She makes an attempt to read the participants' reflections in the light of "professional knowledge landscape metaphor", studying a specific aspect of the participants' work routine: email interaction.
The diversity of studies compiled in this book offer a vital contribution to the studies of metaphor. The chapters do not only contribute to the understanding of metaphor in use, but also provide examples of different methodologies for the ones interested in carrying out research in the metaphor field. The wide range of contexts, the diverse data collection techniques and analytical approaches are evidences of the fertility in the way Applied Linguistics looks at metaphor. Confronting metaphors is a valuable addition to libraries of researchers, graduate students and educators interested in metaphor studies.
Recebido em abril de 2009
Aprovado em maio de 2009
E-mail: vlmop@veramenezes.com
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
14 May 2010 -
Date of issue
2009
