Metaphor Research In Football News Reporting

Cognitive Linguistics is a newly developed genre of linguistics in recentdecades which bases on human perception and experience to the world. Formthe perspective of Cognitive Linguistics; it is generally considered that metaphoris not only a linguistic expression form, but also a popular method of cognition. Itis a conceptual progress of people to use familiar things to help to understandand express the other things.Metaphor is not a surface phenomenon of a language, but a deep-seatedcognitive mechanism of human beings. Metaphor is defined as “to use one thingto understand the other things”. Metaphor helps us with the organization of ourthoughts, to make the language structuring, so it has huge language generationcapability. Actually, metaphorical language is the expression of conceptualmetaphor in language, that is to say human first change one category intoanother through metaphor in concept, and then the phenomenon wordmetaphorical change appears. As a cognitive method, metaphor is systematical,once a conceptual metaphor came into being, there would be a huge number ofexpressions which are also connected harmoniously, and different metaphoricalconcepts constitute a coherent network system that impacts our language andthoughts.This paper bases on conceptual metaphor theory, starts from theperspective of constructing metaphorical cognition, selects and classifies thematerials from a newspaper called football, tries to analyze the metaphoricalphenomenon from football reports. From the content classification, the materialscould be sorted into war metaphor, natural phenomenon metaphor, journeymetaphor, architecture metaphor and power field metaphor. Through theanalysis and interpretations of metaphor cognitive construction, summarized thefunction of conceptual metaphor in football reports: the constituting thecharacteristic elements of the issues in football reports; enhancing theinteraction between authors and readers; increasing interest; expressingauthors’ tendency and emotion. What’s more, it is a reflection of humans’ viewon football, the competition which is cruel, violent and confrontational.