Metaphor in Sports Reporting

Abstract

The analysis of metaphors in the previous two chapters has shown that conflict is the most common source domain for metaphor in English political discourse and accounts for nearly half of all metaphors. This is perhaps not surprising since war has been central to cognitive approaches to metaphor since Lakoff and Johnson (1980). They proposed a conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR — hence: ‘Your claims are indefensible’, ‘He shot down all my arguments’ etc. — and used this to argue that ‘Metaphor means conceptual metaphor’ (ibid.: 6). Even a cursory reading of the British press suggests that the lexical field for conflict — words such as attack and defence, victory and defeat, conquest and slaughter — have become highly conventional metaphors in sports reporting. In this chapter I will compare the lexicon of conflict in a corpus of newspaper sports reports with a general corpus. I will also consider why it is that the British press commonly resort to conflict metaphors in sports reports by considering what aspects of the source domain are concealed or highlighted by metaphor choices and how this contributes towards a cumulative persuasive effect.KeywordsSource DomainSport EventConceptual MetaphorSport ContextCorpus ApproachThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.