The creative use of DEFEAT IS CONTROL in metaphors for sport: A study of NBA news headlines written in Chinese

Year 2020, , 14 - 29, 29.03.2020

Kuan-chung Huang Ming-yu Tseng

https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.712632

Abstract

Many studies investigated metaphors in news; however, few of them focused specifically on headlines. By investigating metaphors in 133 collected NBA news headlines written in Chinese, this paper analyzes the creativity in them. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including conceptual metonymy, is adopted to discuss creative linguistic metaphors and their corresponding conceptual mappings based on diverse translated names of NBA teams and on specific verbs associated with them. Blending Theory is exploited to further account for the process of metaphorical creativity with the names of the teams being involved. As a whole, the findings show that the concept of defeat is creatively utilized as it is physically and/or socially constructed with the co-use of translated NBA team names and the associated verbs in Chinese. As for the process of the metaphorical creativity, three ways of achieving novelty is revealed, involving the names of the winner, the loser, or both of them respectively. Furthermore, because the data transcends the boundaries of countries, creativity is afforded and extended by reporting in Chinese a sport event taking place in an English-speaking country.

Keywords

Chinese; cognitive approach; creativity; news headline; sport metaphor

References

• Aitchen, J. (1987). Words in the mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Arcim Avičienė, L. (2008). Morality through metaphor: A cross-linguistic analysis of political discouerse. Kalbotyra 59, 11–19.
• Bergh, G. (2011). Football is war: A case study of minute-by-minute football commentary. Revista Veredas, 15(2). Retrieved from https://periodicos.ufjf.br/index.php/veredas/article/view/25079
• Boyd, M. E. (2014). Riding the bench – A look at sports metaphors in judicial opinions. Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law, 5, 245–264.
• Brône, G., Feyaerts, K., & Veale, T. (2006). Introduction: Cognitive linguistic approaches to humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 19(3), 203–228. https://doi.org/10.1515/HUMOR.2006.012
• Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Coulson, S., & Oakley, T. (2000). Blending basics (linguistic aspects of conceptual blending theory and conceptual integration). Cognitive Linguistics, 11(3-4), 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2001.014
• Cudd, A. E. (2007). Sporting metaphors: Competition and the ethos of capitalism. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 34, 52–67.
• Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.
• Gibbs, R. W. (1999). Taking metaphors out of our heads and putting it into the cultural world. In R. W. Gibbs & G. Steen (Eds.), Metaphor in cognitive linguistics (pp. 145–166). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Grady, J. E., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. In R. W. Gibbs & G. Steen (Eds.), Metaphor in cognitive linguistics (pp. 101–124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Hidalgo-Downing, L. (2016). Metaphor and metonymy. In Rodney H. Jones (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and creativity (pp. 107–128). Routledge: London and New York.
• Hsu, Y.-H. (2016). The functions of metaphor in Mandarin pop song lyrics: A study of idol drama theme songs. Unpublished MA thesis, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung.
• Hu, Y.-M. (2010). 運動報導中譬喻的使用初探：以2009年洋基紅襪賽事的中英文報導為例 (Metaphor rendition in sports Journalism: A study of the 2009 Yankee vs. Red Sox games reportage). Unpublished MA thesis, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei. [Text in Chinese]
• Khajeh, Z. (2012). Persian culinary metaphors: a cross-cultural conceptualization. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11492258.pdf
• Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kövecses, Z. (2010a). Metaphor, Creativity, and Discourse. DELTA: Documentação e Estudos em Linguística Teórica e Aplicada, 26(3). Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-44502010000300016
• Kövecses, Z. (2010b). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kövecses, Z. (2015). Where metaphors come from: Reconsidering context in metaphor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Langlotz, A. (2016). Language, creativity, and cognition. In R. H. Jones (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and creativity (pp. 40–60). London and New York: Routledge.
• Lewandowski, M. (2009). Metaphors from other sports in the language of soccer – evidence from English and Polish. In P. Nowak & P. Nowakowski (Eds.), Język, Komunikacja, Informacja (Language, Communication, Information) (pp. 29–48). Poznań: Sorus.
• Liu, Y.-T.(2017). A cognitive sociolinguistic study of Angela Zhang’s music videos. Unpublished MA thesis, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi. [Text in Chinese]
• Lundmark, C. (2005). Metaphor and creativity in British magazine advertising. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Luleå. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c744/d0a43b3b4abe5b4a1fda102f95f3325f9dd4.pdf?_ga=2.159675188.861762303.1571318576-1294420950.1514120294
• Molek-Kozakowska, K. (2013). Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines. Discourse & Communication, 7, 173–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481312471668
• López, C. P. (2018). A comparative study of war and sport metaphors in political news headlines. Unpublished manuscript, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona. Retrieved from https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/tfg/2018/196074/Perez_Carla_TFG.pdf
• Raffaelli, I., & Katunar, D. (2016). A discourse approach to conceptual metaphors: A corpus-based analysis of sports discourse in Croatian. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 133, 125–147.
• Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Semino, E. (2010). Unrealistic scenarios, metaphorical blends and rhetorical strategies across genres. English Text Construction, 3, 250–274.
• Shie, J.-S. (2011). Metaphors and metonymies in New York Times and Times Supplement news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1318–1334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.026
• Shields, D., & Bredemeier, B. (2011). Contest, competition, and metaphor. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. 38.27–38.
• Silaški, N. (2009). Topic-triggered metaphors in newspaper headline. Professional Communication and Translation Studies, 2, 59–66.
• Spber, D., & Wilson, D. (2008). A deflationary account of metaphors. In R. W. Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (pp. 84–105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Teng, N. Y., & Sun, S. W. (2001). Metaphoric framing: ROAD as a metaphoric concept in political news in Taiwan. Mass Communication Research, 6, 87–112.
• [Anonymous 2006] Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.
• [Anonymous 2007] Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.