Individual Unmasked: Bilingualism and Metaphorical Competence

In spite of its numerous interpretations, the concept of creativity indubitably remains in close relation with that of metaphor as both notions appear to be heavily reliant on our ability to generate novel and/or original ideas and connections between concepts. Thus, this rather interesting relationship became the subject of a number of different studies, among which those of creative metaphoric competence, a relatively novel notion defined as the ability to connect two seemingly unrelated concepts in new and novel ways (Birdsell, 2018), seem to be of particular note. Therefore, in hopes of providing further insight not only into a certain aspect of the linguistic competence of Croatian-English bilinguals but also the relationship between language proficiency, dominance, and linguistic competence, the paper elected to examine the link between (creative) metaphor competence, and bilingualism, as well as to explore the relationship between creativity, conceptual relatedness and the degree of metaphoricity in an attempt to investigate the norms governing gradability of creativity. Hence, four general hypotheses were formed prior to the conduction of the study. The first hypothesis claimed that a higher level of L2 proficiency entailed higher (creative) metaphor competence; the second hypothesis maintained that Croatian-English bilinguals shall exhibit higher creative metaphoric competence in their dominant L1; lastly, while the third hypothesis asserted that original L1 metaphors are to be perceived as more creative than L2 original metaphors, the fourth and final hypothesis contended that creativity should have a positive relationship with the degree of metaphoricity and a negative connection with conceptual relatedness. The study, conducted remotely via Skype in the form of individual interviews with each of the six participants, was divided into four parts: the first part consisted of a number of general questions regarding the participant’s L1 and L2 use and self-assessment of their linguistic abilities, in the second part, subjects were expected to identify and explain metaphors in Croatian and English newspaper excerpts. Furthermore, the participants were also expected to accurately identify the source language of a given poem using their creative metaphoric competence. The third task consisted of a survey wherein participants had to rate 60 (30 for each language) metaphors –engendered in the task of metaphor production – for creativity, conceptual relatedness and the degree of metaphoricity. The results appear to suggest that a higher level of L2 proficiency does not necessarily entail higher (creative) metaphor competence. Moreover, while Croatian-English bilinguals might identify more metaphors in their native language, in the task of creative metaphor production, the participants were quite evenly distributed. In addition, despite discovering that bilinguals appear to view their L1 metaphors as more creative than their L2 metaphors and that creativity appears to have a positive relationship with the degree of metaphoricity and a negative connection with conceptual relatedness, given the small scale of the study and its exploratory nature, we might say that further, more extensive research is needed to either indisputably confirm or refute the aforementioned hypotheses