ABSTRACT
The publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphor we live by in 1980 represents a remarkable milestone in the linguistic approximation to the metaphor: instead of the earlier metaphor concept as tool limited to the dimensions of poetic and narrative texts, it has became an important role player of everyday communication. The conceptual metaphor concept was coined. Six years later Marco Danesi pointed out in his substantial article The Role of Metaphor in Second Language Pedagogy that without acquisition of conceptual fluency it is not possible to reach mother tongue level in second language learning, not even if the learner shows high communicative and verbal competence. Conceptual fluency is teachable and acquireable like any other linguistic competence. The present paper's aim is to give a general vision of the conceptual fluency concept, alloying later its study with error analysis of Hungarian interlanguage of Japanese learners of Hungarian as a foreign language at the Osaka University. The small-scale empirical study's results show that the student group in question had no special difficulties in acquiring metaphoric expressions, nevertheless the linguistic completion of the same supposed a challenge. This clearly can be followed in the mistakes appearing in their interlanguage. The study also shed light on the fact, that errors do not occur as isolated ones, but likely as a combination of different hypothesis formed on Hungarian during learners' language acquisition process. From the results constructive conclusions can be drawn concerning the didactics of conceptual fluency: firstly, teachers have to emphasize the importance of conceptual fluency in communication; secondly, learners have to assimilate, that metaphoric expressions form integral part of the whole linguistic system of the language, that means, they act according to its rules; thirdly, metaphoric expressions must be taught always in context. |
