A Metaphorical Study Of The Commentary On Football Matches

Lakoff and Johnson think that metaphors exist in our daily life and everywhere.It turns out that a great number of metaphors have been employed to report sport activities.With this area as the research subject and under the guidance of the conceptual theory,the author fully investigated the live Japanese commentary and comment in the final of the 2015 AFC Champions League by combining with the event domain cognition model,and established a corpus about football match commentary and comment.On this basis,metaphor employment is generalized and counted,basic metaphor types is summarized and analyzed in detail for the football match commentary and comment.Moreover,an exploration is also made of the reason why such rhetoric generates and what role it plays.Chapter One elaborates the research subject,objective,methodology,literature overview and issue point,and the theoretical foundation of this paper.Chapter Two gives an elaboration from the perspective of linguistic data selection reasons,source,transcript and characteristics and a counting of metaphor usage in the linguistic data,leading to the finding that there are a total of 387 metaphors in the corpus,including war metaphors,theater metaphors,emperor power metaphors,journey metaphors,and other metaphors.Chapter Three conducts a study of different metaphors included in the corpus from the perspective of the conceptual metaphor theory and event domain cognition model analysis method.It can be found by analyzing various conceptual metaphors based on the conceptual metaphor theory that the following metaphors were found: the study proves that the knowledge,characteristics and relations in the war domain,theater domain,imperial power domain are mapped to football matches.At last,the following metaphors were found: The football match is a war;The football match is a theater performance;The football match is an imperial power struggle.Moreover,a further study is made on metaphor formation and mapping from the source domain to the target domain through using EMC schema,which was under the guidance of the event domain cognition model analysis method.It has been found that there are similarities between the behaviors and events of the source domain and those of the target domain and exist one-to-one relationships.Their similarities are embodied in the following aspects: Both war and football match have similarities in the personnel composition,relationship,motivation and result;Both the theater and football match have similarities in the participant,venue and process;Both imperial power struggle and football match have similarities in the confrontation and motivation;Both journey and football match have similarities in the process,motivation and goal attainment.The last part of this chapter gives an exploration of the reasons for metaphor use from the perspective of the similarities among human daily experience,thinking and mapping,further testifying to the fact that metaphor comes from our daily life and metaphor is generated on the basis of the similarity.Chapter Four investigates the role that the metaphor plays in the commentary of the football match.Firstly,an analysis of war metaphors led to the conclusion that war metaphor renders the football match more visualized and builds a concrete and perceivable scenario.Secondly,an analysis of theater and journey metaphors led to the conclusion that they make the football match artistic,appealing and interactive,thereby providing a new perspective for audience to watch a match.Lastly,an analysis of physicalification metaphors led to the conclusion that metaphor injects vitality to the commentary,arouses audience's rich association and makes the match and language more interesting.Chapter Five gives a summarization of the whole paper,and also points out the problems in this research and future research subjects.