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

In recent years,metaphor studies have focused on news reports,but contrastive studies on conceptual metaphors in sports news reports are relatively rare.On this account,the research aims to study the distribution of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese sports news reports on 2017 NBA Finals and to give reasons for the distributional similarities and differences in metaphor use.The research takes quantitative and qualitative approaches.Twenty-five sports news reports from five Chinese websites and twenty-five ones from five English websites are selected as the research data.Meanwhile,the corpus tool AntConc3.2.4w is adopted to retrieve the keywords of metaphors.Critical Metaphor analysis put forward by Charteris-Black(2004)is used as a methodological framework with three steps,that is,metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation.The major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,through metaphor identification,it can be seen that conceptual metaphors are pervasive in the English and Chinese sports news reports on 2017 NBA Finals.The total number of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English data is 2,021 and 2,086 respectively.There are totally 14 different types of conceptual metaphors in both data.Among them,the top three metaphors in Chinese data are war metaphor(28.3%),human body metaphor(17.8%)and drama metaphor(12.0%),while the top three ones in English data are container metaphor(39.4%),war metaphor(15.4%)and journey metaphor(13.6%).Secondly,through metaphor interpretation,it can be found that similarities and differences exist in metaphor use.Among all the 14 types of conceptual metaphors,myth metaphor only exists in Chinese data,with 0.4% or 8 metaphorical expressions.Thirdly,through metaphor explanation,the similarities of conceptual metaphors are attributed to similar physical experiences and cognition in individual resources.The differences result from diverse cultural backgrounds in social resources.It is hoped that the present research can help readers to better understand sports news reports and deepen their comprehension of social cultures and values of different countries.