An Integrated Approach To Metaphor In Sports Reports

Metaphor, as a common phenomenon in language, has attracted the attention of scholars since ancient times. For 2000 years or more, metaphor has been a heated topic among philosophers, stylists and linguists. Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as a rhetorical device. However, in modern times, the history of metaphor studies has undergone radical changes. Nowadays, with the development of science and cognition of human beings, metaphor begins to enjoy great popularity as a subject of linguistics and cognitive science research. In the past five decades, many researchers from various academic fields have been concerned with metaphor from different perspectives. The researches of metaphor have been transformed from a specialized concern of rhetoricians and literary critics to a multidisciplinary exploration in cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, literature and education, etc. Metaphor exists not only in literary works, but also in non-literary ordinary discourse. Among the metaphors we use in our everyday life, one of the most common types is metaphor in sports reports. However, after some close examinations, we find that no comprehensive study on metaphor in sports reporting has been made. It seems an indisputable fact that the research in this field has been largely neglected. Based on this observation, the current paper attempts to take a close look at metaphor from the applied linguistic perspective through an integrated approach, which means it will incorporate a linguistic, a cognitive and a pragmatic orientation. It is also a critical metaphor analysis which focuses on a specific domain of language use —sports reporting discourse. Throughout the study, the paper mainly addresses this hypothesis: metaphor is a way of thinking and a way of persuading as much as it is a linguistic phenomenon. In order to get a clear insight into this hypothesis, we firstly make an exploration into metaphor from the linguistic, cognitive, and pragmatic aspects, which makes up an integrated approach to metaphor and at the same time forms the theoretical framework for the detailed analysis of metaphor in discourse followed. Second, we present an extensive corpus study by identifying, classifying, interpreting and explaining the metaphors that occur in sports reporting and examining meanings via the integrated approach mentioned in the first stage. Eight kinds of conceptual metaphors, which include war metaphors, journey metaphors, natural phenomena metaphors, organism metaphors, food metaphors, building metaphors, religion metaphors and art metaphors, are carefully investigated and exposed. Finally, from a critical discourse analysis perspective, we explain metaphor choices with reference both to individual linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic knowledge of the encoder and decoder, and to the social resources of culture, ideology and history, which all together build up a tentative dynamic discourse model for metaphor analysis. In general, by unifying a range of theoretical approaches within a broad applied linguistic perspective, that is, the traditional linguistic and cognitive with pragmatic approaches, the present study not only enforces the claim that metaphor is pervasive both in language and thought and it is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and view the world, but also supports and unveils the hypothesis that metaphors are persuasive, which means they are ideologically effective because they are cognitively plausible and evoke an emotional response.