| Metaphor, treated as a figure of speech in rhetoric for a very long time, is now considered as a way of thinking. The breaking point of the process of study of metaphor was Metaphor We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, from which the Conceptual Metaphor Theory was derived. The research of this thesis is based on this theory.Academic achievements on metaphor in sports are conspicuous today. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, some scholars studied metaphor in sports news headlines, while some did a comparative study on headlines of sports news in English and Chinese. However, we can hardly see any corpus-based research on metaphor in sports news headlines in Chinese and English. As sports is playing an increasingly important role in our life, this thesis will be denoted to analyzing the underlying conceptual metaphor in sports news based on a corpus of Chinese and English news headlines.The corpus for this thesis is built respectively from two websites of authority news agency:China News (www.chinanews.com) and NY Times (www.nytimes.com). The period for selection of data is from May 1st,2014 to November 30th,2014.8040 headlines that contains conceptual metaphoric expression are randomly chosen to build the corpus, in which 4032 are Chinese and 4008 English. The metaphorical expressions are then calculated in terms of the type, frequency and percentage. Both the qualitative and quantitative research methods are used in the analysis. Specifically, in this thesis we will concentrate on the similarities and differences in Chinese and English sports news headlines through a comparative study of the data in corpus.The results of the research are presented as follows:the way of metaphor application in both Chinese and English is almost identical, which indicates that people in different languages share a similar process of cognition. Generally speaking, WAR metaphor is most frequently used in sports news headlines, followed by UP-DOWN orientational metaphor and behavior metaphor of HUMAN. The differences of these metaphors reflect the divergence of Chinese and English culture. This thesis is important in the following ways. Firstly, the research is based on a corpus of authentic data of a considerable scale. Thus the research result is reliable. Secondly, this thesis tries to explain the difference between Chinese and English conceptual metaphor from angles other than culture, like language characters, living styles, etc. Last but not least, this thesis is not just to prove the rightness of Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor theory. Some potential questions are raised during the researching process.This research, hopefully, can help people to understand metaphor theory in sports news headlines better, comprehending sports news headlines more thoroughly, and, more importantly and practically, to further study the cognitive way of thinking. |
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