A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors Between NBA And CBA Basketball Game Reports

In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson wrote the book Metaphor We Live in which they put forward systematically that metaphor is cognitive in nature and metaphor is rooted in people’s thought. The research on conceptual metaphor began to prevail in the following 30 years.Among the researches made on the metaphor, many are about the comparative researches between different corpora. However, there has been less systematic and thorough corpus-based research on Chinese and English Sports Games, especially in the field of basketball games.In this thesis, the author tries to compare the conceptual metaphors used by news reports on CBA basketball games and NBA basketball games, and to find out the conceptual metaphors that dominate in both reports, different metaphorical expressions for the same conceptual metaphors as well as different conceptual metaphors. The author then explains the similarities and differences from a cultural and social perspective.The author collected about 150 news reports on CBA basketball games and NBA basketball games respectively and built a Chinese corpus and an English corpus. Based on the conceptual theory put forward by Lakoff, Johnson, Deignan and Kovecses, the author first read through the whole corpora and found out the source domains of the conceptual metaphors according to the catalog. Corpora analyzing software antconc 3.2.4 is adopted to find the frequency of each metaphorical expression after excluding its non-metaphorical meanings. Based on conceptual metaphor theory, the author analyzed the data by corpora-based qualitative research method.The research found out that many kinds of conceptual metaphors existing in both news reports on CBA and NBA basketball games, wherein, the WAR METAPHOR accounts for about 54% and 43% respectively in NBA and CBA corpora. JOURNEY METAPHOR comes next, accounts for about 21.6% and 26.6% respectively in NBA and CBA corpora, while SPACE JOUNEY lists third, accounts for about 7% and 10.3 respectively in NBA and CBA corpora. Through the comparison, it is also found out that WAR METAPHOR accounts for a much greater percentage in CBA corpus than that in NBA corpus, and at the same time, more source domains for COLOR METAPHOR, BODY METAPHOR are found in CBA corpus than that in NBA corpus. On the other hand, more source domains for SHOW METAPHOR, FINANCIAL METAPHOR and JOURNEY METAPHOR are found in NBA corpus than in CBA corpus.The similar cognition of the world leads to the universality in the conceptual metaphors adopted by the reports on Chinese and English basketball game; on the other hand, because of different social and cultural background, preference for certain conceptual metaphors are surly culture-specific and different.With a systematic and thorough comparative research on the conceptual metaphors adopted by the news reports on CBA and NBA basketball games, the author hopes that the thesis can enrich the conceptual metaphor theory and at the same time help the cooperation and communication between the two countries in basketball games as well as in other sports games.