A Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In BBC News Reports

The study of metaphor has always been the focus of linguistic scholarsthroughout history worldwide. In ancient times, Aristotle’s comparison view andQuintilian’s substitute view of metaphor only regard metaphor as a figure of speech.The interaction view put forward by Richards first provides a semantic approach andrecognizes the cognitive feature of metaphor. The revolution of metaphor study camewhen Lakoff and Johnson published their masterpiece Metaphors We Live By in1980,which greatly promotes the study of metaphor into a cognitive stage. In the book,Lakoff demonstrates that metaphor, essentially, is a basic human thinking model and aconceptual mapping between different domains.This thesis aims to carry out a cognitive study of metaphors in BBC news reportson the2012London Olympic Games in order to reveal how journalists make use ofconcrete concepts that are familiar to people to explain the abstract concepts in newsreports. The thesis picks out the conceptual metaphors used in these news reports on the basis of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and classifies themaccording to different source domains in order to work out the mechanism of themapping process of these conceptual metaphors. Therefore,820examples of typicalmetaphorical expressions from200representative BBC Olympic news reports arecollected and examined. According to different source domains and Lakoff’sclassification principle of conceptual metaphor, these examples are divided into fivemain categories of metaphorical expressions, namely, war metaphor, journeymetaphor, container metaphor, recreation metaphor and politics metaphor. Eachcategory of metaphorical expressions is followed by a detailed analysis to illustratethe cognitive functions of different kinds of conceptual metaphors.The conclusion of this study indicates that conceptual metaphors are vastlyemployed in BBC Olympic news reports. All these metaphorical expressions arederived from people’s personal experiences in the physical world which account forthe concrete concepts. And the abstract sports concepts can be comprehended bymeans of the concrete concepts that people are familiar with. Therefore, the BBCnews passages on the2012Olympic Games can be better understood by the readers.In addition, the cognitive study of metaphors in Olympic news reports will improvereaders’ interest in reading other sports news discourses, such as newspapers,magazines, and Internet websites, as well as enhance their comprehensive ability inunderstanding English news discourses.