Once Upon a Time in the Realm of Notions : The Conceptualisation of Novak Djokovic-Inspired Personality Shifts

Abstract

An analysis was carried out with two interviews given by the tennis-player Novak Djokovic, one of which was in English and the other in his native Serbian. In both instances, Novak Djokovic used many conceptual metaphors throughout his speech, some of which were analysed in more detail. The main premise of the research was that people’s personalities change in accordance with language they speak at any given time and that they use different conceptual metaphors to describe the same events in different languages. The aim of the paper was to investigate whether personality shift in bilingual speakers can be observed through the speaker’s use of conceptual metaphors in different languages. Through the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, it was shown that Djokovic’s personality does change with the language he speaks. This change was shown through the conceptual metaphors, i.e., source and target domains that Djokovic used during the interviews. He does indeed use different source domains to conceptualise the same target domains in different languages.