METAPHORS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING: ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN BUSINESS METAPHORS

The use of metaphors, far from being a literary decoration of a text, is instead a part of our everyday language. This feature has been pointed out and extensively studied by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who stressed the cognitive nature of this linguistic device. Thus, learning a foreign language implies to learn not simply grammatical facts, sophisticated as they can be, or idioms, but also the metaphors such language uses or, more appropriately, the conceptual system of metaphors employed by the speakers. Using a metaphor in a cognitive view means to express a concept, belonging into a structured system, in terms of another concept also structured in another system. Despite many conceptual metaphors are grounded into universal domains of knowledge and universal correspondences, their use may differ from culture to culture and, therefore, from language to language, making the learning of a foreign language more difficult, especially in certain domains. In order to facilitate the task of the students it is useful to prepare repositories of metaphoric expressions in different languages and establish correspondences between them. This paper will present the project UvaBuMet, carried out at the University "1 Decembrie 1918" in Alba Iulia, which aims at the building of two corpora of business language both English and Romanian in which metaphors are highlighted by annotation. These will be immediately ready to carry comparison, but also to derive an ontology of business metaphors that allows cross- cultural comparison in the light of the categories proposed by Hofstede (1997). (C) 2017 Published by Future Academy www. FutureAcademy. org. uk\