ABSTRACT

Metaphor use in university contexts has received some attention by the literature, which has mostly focussed on the language produced by academics. However, more dialogic forms of academic communications, where students are afforded opportunities for feedback on and discussion of opaque language use, are usually missing in the analyses of applied metaphor researchers. In order to partially redress this imbalance in research into metaphor in academic discourse, this article looks at lecturers’ use of metaphor in one such dialogic type of communication—academic mentoring—and how international students respond to these language uses. I examine the frequency and functions of metaphor in 27 video-recorded conversations between Spanish Erasmus students and their lecturers at five different European universities. My findings reveal that lecturers use metaphor frequently in this context too, but that it does not appear to pose obvious problems for interaction, although misalignments between speakers can be observed.

摘要

大学语境中的隐喻使用受到了一些文献的关注，这些文献主要集中在学术界产生的语言上。然而，在应用隐喻研究人员的分析中，通常缺少更多对话形式的学术交流，学生有机会就不透明的语言使用进行反馈和讨论。为了部分纠正学术话语中隐喻研究的这种不平衡，本文着眼于讲师在这样一种对话类型的交流（学术指导）中对隐喻的使用，以及国际学生对这些语言使用的反应。我检查了西班牙伊拉斯谟学生和他们在欧洲五所大学的讲师之间的 27 段视频对话中隐喻的频率和功能。