Primary Metaphors in German learning as a foreign language: a case study

Abstract

The present work is a case study which investigates the comprehension of Primary Metaphors in German as a foreign language. Assuming that the Primary Metaphors are potentially universal, it was aimed to analyze the comprehension of five metaphors in the foreign language from the linguistic actualization elaborated by the learner, as well as verify if the second language learner compares the linguistic instantiations in German with the linguistic instantiation in Portuguese. The results corroborated the assumption that the researched metaphors can be potentially universal.