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

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

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