| Metaphor study in academic field could be traced back to two thousand years ago both at home and abroad. The study of metaphors has gone into many academic areas, such as politics, economics and science. But metaphor study in early time was confined to rhetorics and semantics until the1980s when famous scholars Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book entitled Metaphors We Live By in collaboration. This book provides a completely new perspective for metaphor study and the definition of conceptual metaphor is thus produced. Scholars both at home and abroad no longer regard metaphor as a simple rhetoric instrument or distinction of semantics but cognitive instrument and thinking mode. Since then people have put more efforts and time in the study of conceptual metaphors. However, a comparative analysis of conceptual metaphors in different languages is still seldom seen.News headline as a window to readers has received some attention in recent years. Articles about economic and political news headlines from metaphor perspective have reached a certain number. Sports news headline, however, is still a topic that has rarely been touched. With the development of globalization and important roles that sports activities play in communication between human beings, in this thesis these two topics have been studied in combination from the cognitive perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been adopted with the aim to find more similar and different conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English sports news headlines. All the data in the thesis is selected from ESPN and topics mainly cover six common sports activities:football, basketball, golf, boxing, baseball and rugby. The sports activities involve different scales from worldwide Olympics to domestic city games so as to improve the representativeness of results from data analysis of extensive data selection.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One introduces the purpose, significance and overall structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review, which includes two sections. The first section is the retrospection about metaphor study in history, in which three views appeared gradually:the rhetoric view, semantic view and cognitive view. The second section concerns previous metaphor studies in sports news headlinesChapter Three offers a detailed introduction to conceptual metaphor, which serves as the theoretical foundation of the thesis. In this chapter, the definition, cognitive nature, main features, internal structure of conceptual metaphor and its philosophy basis is involved.Chapter Four is about methodology, in which data source, collection methods and research procedures are introduced in detail. The study is conducted through both quantitative and qualitative methods to make a systematic exploration of conceptual metaphors in both Chinese and English sports news headlines. Quantitative study is carried out through random stratification and the same number of sports news headlines in two languages are selected out from ESPN. Qualitative method is used to analyze the selected data.Chapter Five is mainly concerned the results and discussion. In total, there are14subtypes of conceptual metaphors found in the data and the author sums up all the types according to three main categories of conceptual metaphors put forward by Lakoff&Johnson. At last, the similarities and differences in conceptual metaphors used in Chinese and English sports news headlines are analyzed from the angle of culture.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis consisting of three sections. The first section sums up the major findings of the study and in the following part implications of the study are discussed. At last, limitations of the study are discussed and suggestions for future research are made.Through data analysis, the findings could further prove the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphor and its important roles in people’s culture lives. What’s more, the study could help people improve their metaphorical thinking abilities and the comprehension ability of different cultures. The findings of this study will also bring some enlightenment to readers in translation field. As there are so many conceptual metaphors employed in English and Chinese sports news headlines, the correct translation is also based on people’s cognition. In the field of second language teaching, the results of a comparative study of conceptual metaphors in different languages will also be a great help to teachers, for the use of metaphors in language teaching could greatly improve the vitality and flexibility of languages.Finally, it’s hopeful that the findings of this study could make some contribution to sports discourse study. |
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