| For over two thousand years, metaphor has been exposed to the scholars both at home and abroad. Its researching approach and fields have changed a lot. Metaphor,traditionally as a rhetoric tool, was categorized into linguistic phenomenon. The famous Substitution Theory and Comparison Theory were based on such a concept. Therefore,studies on metaphor were confined to literature field then. While in 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson co-published Metaphors We Live By which marked the comprehensive beginning of a cognitive view on metaphor. Since then, metaphor became more of a way of thinking than just a rhetoric device. Besides, it appeared not exclusively in literature language, but in daily discourse of human beings. Nowadays metaphor is the research subject of linguistic, philosophy, psychology and other disciplinary.Sports news is one of the channels of getting information for sports events, adding that conceptual metaphors are extensively applied in it. Hence sports news discourse secures the possibility of text analysis for conceptual metaphor research. Though many researchers have carried out this kind of research from a cognitive perspective, they were not systematically and comprehensively enough. Inspired by previous ones, this thesis gives a relatively systematical study on conceptual metaphor, from categorization to cross-domain mapping. In all, this thesis offers clues following two questions: first, what types of conceptual metaphors exist in English sports news? Second, how do the mappings from source domain to target domain are achieved in these conceptual metaphors?Under the guidance of Conceptual Theory of Lakoff and his colleagues, this thesis analyzes 100 pieces of sports news from Washington Post, dated from March to September in 2014. After an overall analysis of the original material, it reveals the types and features of conceptual metaphor in English sports news, the mapping process,constraining mechanisms and cognitive functions.This thesis points out distribution of three types of metaphors, mainly structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor in the selected news. Namely there are in total nine common structural metaphors in English sports news, among which WAR metaphor, NATURAL PHENOMENON metaphor and JOURNEY metaphor occupy the top three. As to ontological ones, CONTAINER metaphor and PERSON metaphor are in a higher occurrence. Last but not least, orientational metaphor MORE IS UP/LESS IS DOWN and HIGH STATUS IS UP/LOW STATUS IS DOWNmetaphors are in more frequent use. Besides, these sub-conceptual metaphors distributed unevenly in certain sports events.Later, through cases study, the process of cross-domain is presented, mainly entities,features, relationships and inference patterns of source domain being mapped into target domain. However, this kind of mapping is not random. It must be constrained by some conditions. Then cognitive functions of conceptual metaphor are mentioned.In the end, the implications of this thesis are revealed. For example, it offers a much efficient way for English vocabulary learning. In addition, it is also an inspiration for English writing, especially for news writing. |
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