War Metaphor In Sports News Reporting

With the globalization of the modern human society, international communication has been being enhanced by means of sports. More and more sports are entering people's sight; sports news reporting also attracts more attention. More and more sports news reporting has been studied academically. In general, most of the previous studies of sports news reporting in the field of linguistics focus on writing techniques and stylistic features from a journalistic perspective and a stylistic perspective,but only a few studies from a cognitive perspective.According to the cognitive metaphor theory represented by American scholars, Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is an important means of thinking rather than a linguistic phenomenon. It is the most important characteristic of human's abstract thinking and the foundation of human's cognition, thinking, language and even action. In the famous book, Metaphors We Live By, they claim that metaphorical expressions are not in language, but in thought;"They are general mappings across conceptual domains"; the nature of metaphor is to use one thing to understand and experience another thing. Metaphor is cognitive in nature by which human understands the material world. Furthermore, conceptual metaphor allows human to understand a comparatively abstract concept in terms of a more concrete concept systematically.The thesis attempts to study sports news reporting in the field of conceptual metaphor theory. Major points will be analyzed in this paper are why people use war language to describe sports, systematicity of metaphorical concept of GAME IS WAR, highlighting and hiding of GAME IS WAR and the effects of war metaphor.Through detailed study of war metaphors in sports news reporting, the thesis aims to prove that people understand the concept of sports by the concept of war. Both reporters and readers think about sport in terms of the concept of war automatically and unconsciously. It also provides further reinforcement of Lakoff and Johnson's theory, they claim that metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life; and our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.