| As a rhetorical device, metaphor has always been the concern of scholars at all times and in all over the world. From the age of Aristotle, metaphor has become the object of study of philosophers, linguists and stylisticians. With the development of contemporary linguistic study, metaphor is no longer taken as a matter of language but a kind of tool and means of thought. In1980, the publication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson marked the turn of great reform in metaphor study.For the past few years, the upsurge of metaphor study has been intense all over the world, but it has presented some new characteristics. Metaphor is no longer studied only in the range of linguistics, but in a wide range of subject areas which include linguisties, philosophy, literature, psychology, law, politics, economics, news and so on.With the great popularity of sports, sports news, as a special news style, gets more and more attention from scholars. The2012London Olympic Games pushes people’s enthusiasm for sports up to a new level. People are eager to know the English sports news related to it. In view of this, this thesis selects the English sports news about the2012London Olympic Games as the object of this research. A large number of metaphorical expressions are filtered out from the50selected pieces of English sports news. Qualitative and quantitative approaches are applied to study the data in detail. This study tries to answer the following two questions:1. What conceptual metaphors are used in English sports news?2. How is the cognitive process realized through the projection from source domain to target domain?Through the above comprehensive and systematic analysis, it is found that there are ten kinds of structural metaphors, four kinds of ontological metaphors and one kind of orientational metaphor in English sports news in all. In structural metaphor, WAR metaphor takes the largest proportion, the other two important metaphors are JOURNEY metaphor and NATURAL PHENOMENON metaphor. Personification and CONTAINER metaphor are the most representative kinds in ontological metaphor. GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN orientational metaphor is also frequently used in English sports news. Through the detailed analysis of the conceptual metaphors in English sports news, this thesis uncovers the cognitive process of projection from the source domain to the target domain in English sports news and provides people a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the conceptual metaphors in English sports news.The author hopes this study would have some implications on L2English vocabulary acquisition and teaching as well as English news writing. |
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