Conceptual Metaphors of Learning in Vietnamese Film Conversations

Abstract

Conversation – or verbal communication between people – is essential in our everyday lives. People need to talk in social relationships or in common communication to exchange information, establish and maintain social relationships, and discuss together to find solutions to professional issues and even other problems in their daily lives. According to Liddicoat (2007), one of the ways people can socialize, develop, and sustain their relationships is through conversation. As a result, delivering information smoothly is critical to achieving its goal. Understanding and attraction are inseparable in conversational analytic thinking- understanding is a continuous, dynamic process that is constructed and modified in and through interaction.

Conversations in films are also talks about issues in people's daily lives. Although the scriptwriters choose and write the conversational settings, their purposes are the same as those in everyday conversations, as Dose (2013) states, "Speakers use language for a wide range of communicative purposes: in tradition to conveying information, speakers express opinions, feelings, and attitudes." As a result, conversational situations in films contain obstacles that make conversations less smooth than conversations in real life.

Kövecses (2005), for example, discusses the role of cultural variation in metaphor usage. Charteris-Black (2004) investigates political and religious discourse as well as press reports, whereas Semino (2008) contributes metaphor analyses of literature, politics, science and education, conversations, and the media's representation of illness.

Carter (2004) refers to metaphor use in conversation as 'demotic creativity.' Cameron (e.g., 1999, 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b) continues to contribute to the study of metaphor in speech.

They provide metaphor analyses from a multimodal perspective, including the interaction of language and gesture as well as language and pictures. The focus on authentic manifestations of metaphor and their functions in actual discourse, rather than theorizing on the basis of invented examples, is a critical tenet in each of these studies.

In Vietnam, basing on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, a  number of  scholars give  a  variety of  reviews, overviews, research related to conceptual metaphor, for example, Suy nghĩ về ẩn dụ khái niện trong thế giới thi ca từ góc nhìn của ngôn ngữ học tri nhận (Thinking of conceptual metaphor in poetry in terms of cognitive linguistics) (Nguyễn Lai, 2009), Khảo luận ẩn dụ tri nhận (Treatise of cognitive metaphor) (Trần Văn Cơ, 2009), Ẩn dụ ý niệm (Conceptual metaphor) (Phan Thế Hưng, 2007), Ẩn dụ dưới góc độ tri nhận (Metaphor from the perspective of cognition) (Phan Thế Hưng, 2009); Ẩn dụ trong tình yêu (Metaphor in love) (Phan Văn Hòa, 2011) and so on.

However, as a concept denoting conversation, university students ‘conversation has received little attention thus far. There is no research on the conceptual metaphor of university students' conversations anywhere in the world. Similarly, no previous studies of conceptual metaphors in university students' conversations have been conducted in Vietnam. As a result, the author would like to conduct this research to investigate the conceptual metaphors used in the Vietnamese film conversations. This study aims at understanding the usage of metaphors in Vietnamese students’ conversations in educational films in term of cognitive linguistics.