War Metaphor In Sports News Reporting

As an indispensable part of social life,sport plays an important role in our life;and it is even being regarded as an important symbol of human civilization.It is true that with the development of economy and the enhancement of international communication,sport has been attracting more and more attention;and the news reporting concerning sport in media gains an increasing attention.More and more scholars have stepped into the study of sports news reporting from different perspectives and with different focuses.In general, the previous studies of sports news report in the field of linguistics mainly focus on writing techniques and stylistic features from a journalistic perspective and a stylistic perspective.Seldom do their studies from a cognitive perspective.Within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,the present thesis is the study of sports news reporting from a cognitive perspective by examining the war metaphor in sports news reporting.The study is conducted through data analysis of which the data is collected from the Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.The data includes all the headlines,within the period from August 7^th to August 24^th,2008,both in Chinese and English of three types of sports,that is,basketball,football and baseball.Four major mapping processes involved in conceptual metaphor SPORT IS WAR,namely,mapping the entity,the relationship,the feature and the knowledge of war onto sport,are discussed in the thesis.By conducting the data analysis,the present thesis aims to reveal that war metaphor enjoys high frequency in sports news reporting both at the lexical level and the textual level;and that both reporters and readers of the sports news reporting are automatically and unconsciously think about and talk about sport in terms of the concept of war.In addition,the thesis also aims to provide solid data to further reinforce Lakoff and Johnson's 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.