| In 1980s, Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson facilitated the movement of metaphor research from linguistic era into cognitive era. Metaphor is no longer considered as merely a device of rhetoric, but a way of thought and one useful cognitive tool for human being to perceive the world. With the advancement of metaphor research, many scholars begin to analyze the use of metaphor in some particular area, such as political, scientific as well as economic discourse.Sports news report, as one special news style, should not only give a precise description of the match process and the results, but also presents vividly the atmosphere of the match with various kinds of writing skills. Among them, metaphor is an essential one. However, compared with the researches made in other discourse, metaphor study in sports news discourse is relatively few. Comparative study of metaphor use between different languages is much less. With this regard, based on the contemporary metaphor theory, the present study tries to make a comparison of the use of conceptual metaphors as well as metaphorical expressions between Chinese and English sports news reports.With the enhancement of international communication, World Cup, as one of the world-wide sports matches, attracts more and more people's interest and attention. Therefore, this study takes the 2010 World Cup reports as the source of data. Chinese data is taken from Ti Tan sports and English data from The New York Times. Based on Chinese data with a size of 32,595 words and English data with a size of 32,049 words, this study tries to answer the following questions:1) To what extent are the Conceptual metaphors as well as metaphorical expressions used in Chinese news reports different from or similar to English ones? 2) What are the underlying reasons for those differences and similarities?Results of the study show that both Chinese and English report are highly metaphorical. The common conceptual metaphors shared by two languages are the following 13 types:War Metaphor, Other Sports Metaphor, Drama Metaphor, Container Metaphor, Human Metaphor, Journey Metaphor, Food Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Plant Metaphor, Animal Metaphor, Special Culture Metaphor, Synaesthenic Metaphor and Nature Metaphor. While the differences lie in the Weapon Metaphor and Gamble Metaphor, which occur only in Chinese data and Dream Metaphor which appeared only in English data. The first five metaphors constitute about 80% of all the metaphorical expressions in each data, among which, War Metaphor takes the largest proportion. Such similarities of conceptual metaphor are tentatively attributed to the shared cognition of people all over the world as well as the similar daily experience. Besides, with examples extracted from data, the realizations of each conceptual metaphor are tentatively explained.Metaphorical expression under the same conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese data shares some similarities but also have divergences in the type and occurrence. For instance, under War Metaphor, the types of metaphorical expressions used in Chinese data are much more than those in English ones; occurrence of Journey Metaphor in English data is much higher than that in Chinese data. We tentatively suggest that the differences are caused by the cultural divergence, historic experiences, as well as social and geographical environment.It is hoped that this study could have some implications for English teaching and learning as well as further contrastive studies of metaphor in sports news report. |
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