| The publication of Metaphors We Live By opened a new page of the study onmetaphor. Since then conceptual metaphor has become the hot issue in various fields.The profound influence of conceptual metaphor theory presents not only on theacademic world but also on many social-life aspects. Sports news reporting, as oneimportant part of news discourses, also demonstrates the influence of metaphor. Theheadline, as the window of news reporting, definitely embodies the abundantutilization of conceptual metaphor. The utilization of conceptual metaphor increasesthe vividness and enjoyment of the sports news, and meanwhile attracts the readers’interests to understand the connotation of the sports news further.The Olympic Games are the most influential sports event all over the world.During the Olympic Games, a lot of news media coming from different countries andareas will report this event at length. This thesis has collected1719pieces of Olympicsports news headlines from the websites of four influential newspapers, namely, TheWashington Post, The Guardian, Global Times, and Titan Weekly. In order to make thestudy more accurate and objective, the headlines were chosen at random from2012Summer Olympic Games in London and2014Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. Thenumber of headlines from the two Olympic Games was almost equal. In addition,837headlines constitute the English data and882headlines belong to the Chinese data.This thesis makes a contrastive study of the Olympic sports news headlines betweenEnglish and Chinese by using both qualitative approach and quantitative approachaiming to give answers to the following questions:1. What are the main categories of conceptual metaphors in Olympic sportsnews headlines between English and Chinese?2. How does the mapping mechanism work in analyzing typical conceptualmetaphors in the data?3. As far as the similarities and differences are concerned, what cultural factorscan account for them?Concerning the organization of the thesis, it includes five chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction of the study, introducing the background ofthe study, the significance of the study and the organization of the study.Chapter Two is about the literature review and theoretical framework. In thischapter, metaphor, some key points of the conceptual metaphor theory and the study of sports news headlines will be reviewed.Chapter Three is the research design, including the research questions, researchmethods, data collection, and research procedures.Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis. Based on the data collected, theresearch questions will be discussed and analyzed in detail, and explanation onsimilarities and differences will also be given mainly from the perspective of culture.Chapter Five, as the conclusion chapter, will give a summary of the majorfindings, limitations and suggestions for further study.Throughout the contrastive analysis of the data, this thesis finds out: firstly, interms of Olympic sports news headlines, there are some similar conceptual metaphorsin two languages and also special ones mainly occurring in one language; secondly,WAR metaphor is in a dominant place of the conceptual metaphors of Olympic sportsnews headlines in two languages; thirdly, mapping, the working mechanism ofconceptual metaphors, is systematic and partial; finally, some cultural factors can begiven to explain the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors of Olympicsports news headlines between English and Chinese.It is hoped that this thesis can make the readers better understand the headlinesof the Olympic sports news and give some implication of conceptual metaphor studyon sports news. |
PDF Full Text Request