A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Sports News Reports

As a pervasive phenomenon, metaphor has been a heated topic under discussion since Aristotle’s time.Traditional theories regard metaphor as a figure of speech. However, in 1980 s, Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson facilitated the movement of metaphor research from a linguistic era into a cognitive era. Metaphor is no longer considered as merely a device of rhetoric, but a way of thought and one useful cognitive tool for human beings to perceive the world. With the advancement of metaphor research, many scholars begin to analyze the use of metaphor in some particular areas, such as political,economic as well as scientific discourse.Sports news report, as one special news style, should not only give a precise description of the match process and the results, but also present vividly the atmosphere of the match with various kinds of writing skills. Among them, metaphor is an essential one. However, compared with the studies made in other discourse, metaphor study in sports news discourse is relatively few. Comparative studies of metaphor using between different languages is even fewer. With this regard, based on the conceptual metaphor theory,the present study tries to make a comparison of the use of conceptual metaphors as well as metaphorical expressions between Chinese and English sports news reports.This thesis takes the 2014 World Cup reports as the source of data. The English data is collected from www.fifa.com, while the Chinese data collected from www.titan24.com.The author selects 30 pieces of English sports news reports and 30 pieces of Chinese sports news reports from the websites above and set up two corpora respectively. Through the comparative study of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese sports news reports, this study tries to answer the following questions:(1)What are the main types of conceptual metaphors used in Chinese and English sports news reports?(2)What are the similarities and the differences of the conceptual metaphors between English and Chinese sports news reports from the cognitive perspective?(3)What factors lead to the similarities and differences of the conceptual metaphors between English and Chinese sports news reports?Results of the study show that both Chinese and English report are highly metaphorical. The common conceptual metaphors shared by two languages are the following 10 types: War Metaphor, Journey Metaphor, Drama Metaphor, Animal Metaphor, Nature Metaphor, Religion Metaphor, Container Metaphor,UP-DOWN Metaphor, Human Being Metaphor and School Metaphor. The top eight conceptual metaphors appear in both English and Chinese corpora, while human being metaphor and school metaphor are only inthe Chinese corpus. War metaphor takes the largest proportion in both two corpora while the proportion of container metaphor in English corpus is higher than which in Chinese corpus.Metaphorical expressions under the same conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese data share some similarities but also have divergences in the type and occurrence. It is tentatively suggested that the similarities are due to the similar cognitive system of human beings and their physical experiences, while the differences are caused by the divergence in their culture and ideological concepts.