A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of SHOW Metaphors In English And Chinese Sports News

In many English and Chinese sports news,words and expressions of show are used metaphorically to describe a variety of sports games.Previous studies of sports game metaphors mainly discuss the linguistic manifestations of conceptual metaphors,paying little attention to their underlying cognitive motivations.The present study analyzes the linguistic patterns of SHOW metaphors in English and Chinese sports news,and accounts for their similarities and differences from a cognitive perspective.Based on Lakoff and Johnson(1980)’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fillmore(1982)’s Frame Semantics Theory,this study attempts to conduct a corpus-based comparative analysis of metaphor SPORTS GAMES IS A SHOW in English and Chinese sports news,followed by an explanation of the cognitive factors motivating their similarities and differences.The current study takes Wmatrix as the linguistic data processing tool,and Frame Net as the analytical tool to analyze the conceptual frames and metaphorical mappings of SHOW metaphors in sports news.It applies the “Metaphor Identification Procedure”(MIP)proposed by the Pragglejaz Group(2007)to identify metaphorically used expressions of the SHOW frame.It examines the similarities and differences in the conceptualization of sports games via SHOW metaphors in English and Chinese via both qualitative and quantitative data,and probes into the cognitive motivations underlying these similarities and differences.The findings are as follows:(1)The conceptual metaphor SPORTS GAMES IS A SHOW has rich linguistic manifestations in English and Chinese sports news.All elements of the SHOW frame are metaphorically mapped onto the target domain sports games,including participants,categories,process,venues and entities.Some categories of SHOW exist in both English and Chinese,such as “musical show”,“dancing show”,“one-man show”,“TV show” and so on.Lexical items,such as “performance”,“stage”,“debut”,and “role”,have a comparatively high frequency in both corpora.(2)Differences of SHOW metaphors in English and Chinese mainly manifest themselves in two aspects,namely,selection of specific frame elements of SHOW and the frequency of occurrence of lexical items.First,certain source domains are language-specific,such as“Chinese opera”and“folk art show”in Chinese,and“drama show”,“magic show”and“acrobatic show”in English.Second,some lexical items show great discrepancy in frequency in English and Chinese.For example,“舞台”and“幕”in Chinese are salient elements with much higher frequency than their equivalents in English,while“arena”and“spotlight”in English have higher frequencies than their equivalents in Chinese.Similarities of the conceptual metaphor SPORTS GAMES IS A SHOW in English and Chinese are grounded in common embodied experience.Differences of SHOW metaphors between English and Chinese arise from different meaning focus and sociocultural experience.English sports highlights the competitive nature of sports games and consummate skills of performers,while Chinese corpus highlights the entertaining nature and recreational purpose of sports games.Furthermore,differences in sociocultural experience,especially salient and culture-specific experience,motivate numerous culture-specific linguistic instantiations.In general,the choice of a specific source domain is to highlight a certain property of the target concept.