A Cognitive Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Chinese and English Volleyball Sports News Reports
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ISSN 1712-8358[Print] Cross-Cultural Communication ISSN 1923-6700[Online] Vol. 16, No. 4, 2020, pp. 75-83 www.cscanada.net DOI:10.3968/11941 www.cscanada.org A Cognitive Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Chinese and English Volleyball Sports News Reports LIU Mengna[a]; CHEN Jinshi[b],* [a]School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of just a linguistically rhetorical device but a cognitive Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. device structuring thoughts and actions (Lakoff & [b] Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China Johnson, 1980); human beings think about the world *Corresponding author. metaphorically. Therefore, understanding metaphors is Received 22 August 2020; accepted 6 October 2020 indispensable to explore human’s cognitive mechanism. Published online 26 December 2020 As metaphor can reflect human’s thinking mechanism, cultural differences would be unconsciously demonstrated Abstract through the linguistic representation of metaphor, i.e. metaphorical expression (Geeraerts & Grondelaers, 1995; With the development of human civilization and Maalej, 2001). It is significant to explore metaphors in people’s material and cultural life, sports events play an different discourses for the understanding of people’s increasingly important role in human’s life. Metaphors thinking mechanism and cultural differences. can facilitate people’s understanding of sports news and With the development of human civilization and attract people’s attention. The present study conducts a people’s material and cultural life, sports events play comparative study of Chinese and English Rio Olympic an increasingly important role in human’s life. There is sports, aiming to answer the following questions: (1) no denying that people who are interested in sports and What are the typical conceptual metaphors in Chinese pay close attention to the big events of sports games will and English Rio Olympic news reports on the Woman’s resort to the sports news to get information. Metaphors Volleyball Final Game? (2) What are the similarities abundant in sports news reports facilitate the people’s and differences of conceptual metaphors’ frequencies of understanding of sports games and make the news reports occurrence between Chinese and English Rio Olympic more vivid (Wang, 2004). Some studies about metaphors news reports on the Woman’s Volleyball final game? have been conducted on the sports news reports or sports Based on the analysis, the cognitive mechanism of news headlines in various fields, i.e. ice hockey, tennis typical conceptual metaphor is elaborated as well as the and ball events such as soccer, basketball, but few studies similarities and differences of conceptual metaphor in examine the metaphors in sports news of volleyball. As Chinese and English volleyball news reports. one of the most popular sports activities in both China Conceptual metaphor; Comparative Key words: and English countries, volleyball news reports deserve our analysis; Rio Olympic Volleyball Final Game attention, and the investigation on metaphors in the news can help probe into the cognitive process of the human’s Liu, M. N., & Chen, J. S. (2020). A Cognitive Analysis of Conceptual understanding of the sports, volleyball games. Besides, Metaphors in Chinese and English Volleyball Sports News Reports. Cross-Cultural Communication, 16(4), 75-83. Available the focus on metaphor in sports news has eclipsed the from: http//www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc/article/view/11941 exploration of different thinking patterns arousing from DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11941 cultural differences in the field of volleyball games. Therefore, the paper will carry out a comparative study on metaphors in Chinese and English volleyball sports 1. INTRODUCTION news, taking the news reports on Woman’s Volleyball Metaphor is prevalent. Since the publication of Final Game in Rio Olympics as examples. The paper is Metaphors we live by, scholars realized metaphor is not devoted to revealing the underlying cognitive mechanism 75 Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture A Cognitive Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Chinese and English Volleyball Sports News Reports through the exploration of conceptual metaphors in 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK volleyball sports news reports as well as demonstrating Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 5) define metaphor as the similarities and differences in thinking patterns. The “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in paper attempts to answer the following questions. terms of another.”. Unlike what we traditionally view (1) What are the typical conceptual metaphors in metaphor as a familiar linguistic phenomenon and Chinese and English Rio Olympic news reports on the rhetorical devices used to modify the language, they also Woman’s Volleyball Final Game? propose that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not (2) What are the similarities and differences in the just in language but in thought and action” and “Human frequencies of conceptual metaphors between Chinese and thought processes are largely metaphorical” (Lakoff & English news reports? Johnson, 1980, p. 6). in other words, Metaphors need to (3) How do conceptual metaphors in sports news be understood in a cognitive way. They mentioned that reflect human’s cognitive mechanism? metaphor is only derivatively a matter of language and metaphorical expression is the surface realization of such 2. METAPHORS IN SPORTS NEWS cross-domain mapping linguistically (Lakoff, 1993, p. 203). Therefore, metaphor is not just a series of words, but a way REPORTS of thinking, experiencing, and interacting with the world; Sports play a very important role in people’s daily life, however, we can understand conceptual metaphor through reflecting the civilization of human beings. With various its linguistic representation --- metaphorical expression. large, middle, and small-sized sports events held in the The working mechanism of conceptual metaphor is world each year, metaphors in sports news reports also elaborated in Lakoff’s book titled The Contemporary have received some attention. SPORTS IS WAR is the Theory of Metaphor and Metaphors we lived by. He points most typical and frequently used metaphors in sports out that “metaphor is a cross-mapping from the source news reports and many studies focus on the analysis of domain to the target domain in the conceptual system” this classic metaphor, revealing the explicit and implicit (Lakoff, 1993, p. 43). Each such domain is a constructed justification of WAR metaphor used in sports news (S. whole within our experience that is conceptualized as an Wang, 2004; Yuan, 2017). For metaphor analysis of s experiential gestalt (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 117). news of the specific sports, some studies analyze the However, concepts in source domain are more concrete, conceptual metaphor in news reports of tennis (Huang, easily-accessed and familiar to people, while concepts in 2017), ice hockey (Zhou & Yang, 2012) and other ball target domain are more abstract and harder to understand. events such as basketball (Lin, 2012) and football (M. The source domain is employed to help conceptualize Wang, 2019). It is shown that WAR metaphors appear the target domain. Metaphor can be described as X IS most frequently and other types of metaphors also Y in the conceptual system, in which X represents the exist such as JOURNEY metaphor, PERFORMANCE target domain, and Y represents the source domain. This metaphor. The comparison of metaphor in sports news mapping illustrates the directionality of interaction and it reports in Chinese and English interests many scholars to is systematic as there exists a fixed set of correspondence explore the cultural difference reflected in news reports between the target domain and source domain. Metaphor of various events (Chen, 2019; Cheng, 2015; Lin, 2012; appears as the shared feature, properties in the source M. Wang, 2019). Besides, the comparative studies also domain and the target domain. involve the metaphors occurring in sports news titles Lakoff and Johnson (1980) classified metaphors into in the Rio Olympic games (Xie, 2018), and the general three types from the perspective of people’s cognitive sports news reports (Cheng, 2015). However, there is mechanism. They are structural metaphors, ontological little research about metaphors in Volleyball news reports, metaphor and orientational metaphor. not to mention the comparative research on volleyball In terms of structural metaphor, one concept is news report research. With the China women’s national conceptualized by means of another structured one. volley team winning the Championship in the Rio Lakoff (1993, p. 245) explains that “they allow us to Olympic games, this final game becomes a hot topic in understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured Chinese and international communities. There are many subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least Chinese and English volleyball news reports about this more highly structured subject matter”. Lakoff provides final game. Therefore, this paper intends to take news us with an illustrative example of structure metaphor, that reports on this volleyball final game as the database and to is, ARGUMENT IS WAR. There exist a wide variety of conduct a comparative study about Chinese and English linguistic expressions for this metaphor such as “your sports news on volleyball games, so as to investigate the claims are