Figurative Thinking and Textual Competence

Abstract

So far we have discussed the role that figurative thinking can play in helping language learners develop sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence. In this chapter we turn to the third section in Bachman’s model, namely textual competence. As we saw in Chapter 5, textual competence refers to one’s ability to appreciate the overall conceptual and rhetorical structure of oral or written discourse. We will continue to use ‘discourse’ as a general term and ‘text’ for the specifically language-related components of it: whether spoken utterances or written sentences. Essentially, we will consider how the figurative pieces of the jigsaw discussed earlier are brought together by speakers and writers, to handle entire texts, or at least large stretches of text. The way figurative expressions or notions contribute to a text as a whole is closely related to distribution, so part of our argument concerns how figurative expressions, or the realisation of underlying figurative notions, are spread across the resulting text.