Academic literature on the topic 'Figurative language'

Whereas past and current digital projects in ancient language studies have been concerned with the annotation of linguistic elements and metadata, there is now an increased interest in the annotation of elements above the linguistic level that are determined by context – like figurative language. Such projects bring their own set of problems (the automatisation of annotation is more difficult, for instance), but also allow us to develop new ways of examining the data. For this reason, we have attempted to take an already annotated database of Ancient Egyptian texts and develop a complementary tagging layer rather than starting from scratch with a new database. In this paper, we present our work in developing a metaphor annotation layer for the Late Egyptian text database of Projet Ramsès (Université de Liège) and in so doing address more general questions: 1) How to ‚tailor-make’ annotation layers to fit other databases? (Workflow) 2) How to make annotations that are flexible enough to be altered in the course of the annotation process? (Project design) 3) What kind of potential do such layers have for integration with existing and future annotations? (Sustainability)

This is a small qualitative study on figurative language teaching within Swedish schools that stems of from a social-constructionist perspective. The objective of this study is to establish to what extent figurative language is being taught throughout the Swedish school system and illustrate examples of different approaches teachers could use to teach it.

This study compares English and Arabic figurative expressions linguistically and conceptually and investigates how Arabic-speaking learners of English comprehend and produce English figurative expressions. It argues that English figurative expressions that are linguistically and conceptually similar to Arabic (SFE) are easy while English figurative expressions that are linguistically and conceptually different from Arabic (DFE) are difficult. Also, English figurative expressions that are linguistically different but conceptually similar to Arabic (S-DFE) are of medium difficulty. A comparative analysis was used to develop a set of tasks to test 100 students’ receptive and productive skills in English figurative language. The data came from 832 items identified in two ESL textbooks used with first year students at King Abdul Aziz University. The results show that SFE is much easier than DFE. S-DFE showed variable results but students tended to find them difficult. However, some examples of SFE were found difficult and of DFE easy. These indicate that similarities or differences across languages do not always make it easy or difficult for learners to understand and produce L2 expressions. The results also show evidence of positive transfer mostly with SFE, and negative transfer with DFE and S-DFE. The findings lend further support to the contrastive analysis hypothesis; however, they also support the cognitive approach because they show the role of learners’ linguistic and conceptual knowledge in the comprehension and production of L2 expressions. The findings of this empirical study demonstrate the essential roles of cross-linguistic comparisons of English and Arabic figurative language on the linguistic and conceptual levels for exploring learners’ receptive and productive skills in English figurative language. The classification of figurative language as easy or difficult has some implications for the teaching of English figurative expressions.

The relationship between the literal language and conduct problems among conduct disordered adolescents was examined in 109 subjects. The inability to use figurative language was found to be positively related to ratings of conduct problems. Both the parents' discipline style and nonuse of figurative language were related to 111 conduct problems in conduct disordered adolescents. The possible role of other variables, for example, age, sex, and IQ, was examined. Possible mechanisms that could relate the lack of figurative competence and conduct problems were explored.