A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Sports News Between Chinese And English

Metaphor has been treated as a significant phenomenon. Metaphors are considered as a figure of speech for a while. In the book Metaphor We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson proposed a theory that metaphor has been viewed as a matter of thinking, a branch of cognition. In other words, it offers a theoretical way for people to have a better understanding of the world. According to the abstractness of sports discourse, abundant metaphorical expressions have been existed in sports news area, which has highlighted the experts’attention on the sports news.Even though sports exists ubiquity in our daily life, many special sports terms are not easy for common readers to obtain. In order to get a better understanding of sports news, abundant metaphorical expressions in sports have been explored in this area. The author adopts the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. This thesis tries to use the working mechanism of conceptual metaphors to illustrate the culture differences between Chinese and English metaphorical expressions conveyed.482 Chinese sports metaphorical expressions and 470 English sports metaphorical expressions are selected from the magazine Sports Illustrated in 2014. After that, the conceptual metaphors are classified into eight main categories:WAR metaphor, HUMAN metaphor, JOURNEY metaphor, NATURE SCENERY metaphor, ANIMAL metaphor, PLANT metaphor, DRAMA metaphor, and DREAM metaphor. Then, according to the comparison of the two categories through the quantitative analysis, the author discovers the different frequencies as the response to the culture difference. What’s more, the study gives a further illustration of metaphorical expressions in sports field. It is expected that the study may offer a help for both Chinese and English learners in comprehension the abstract sports news metaphors and cognitive ability.