Chapter 5. Metaphor variation across L1 and L2 speakers of English

English and Swedish, which are both Germanic languages spoken in similar cultures in the Western World, display many similarities with regard to the conceptual metaphors reflected in them. However, the way that the same conceptual metaphor is linguistically instantiated in both languages may be somewhat different. This chapter is a corpus-based analysis of metaphorical ‘path’, ‘road’, and ‘way’ sentences in English produced by speakers with British English as their first language (L1) and Swedish university students with English as their second language (L2). The aim is to see how these L2 speakers of English deal with differences at the level of linguistic metaphor in the two languages, and find out how important this level of organization really is.