The Same Genre for Different Audiences
85been drawn from an earlier corpus-driven study (Lewandowski 2011).
Columns 1 and 2 show the mappings between the source and target
domains. It turns out that, hypothetically, it would be feasible to write a
match report that is steeped in the metaphor of war, especially when the
game was highly competitive. Some words, such as attack, defense, strike,
shoot (as well as their derivatives), etc., which, naturally, may evoke the
image of warfare, have been excluded from this microanalysis as they
constitute core football terminology and can be regarded as instances of
dead metaphors.
Below are some examples of use from both corpora:
- EDINSON CAVANI cancelled out Branislav Ivanovic's powerful header
to earn Paris Saint-Germain a 1-1 draw against Chelsea in their Champions
League clash. (EXP) - The Real siege only grew in strength, even if their anxiety followed suit.
(IND) - Buffon was called into action again moments later to fingertip Ferreira-
Carrasco's deflected effort around the left post. (USA)
Based on the above data, the WAR metaphor has been invoked more
than twice as frequently (36:15) by the British sportswriters as by the
American ones. The conceptual metaphor is not only more pervasive in the
UK corpus, but it also shows a greater degree of elaboration. Out of the 20
expressions listed in Table 3, as many as 10 were not found in the US
corpus (note, for example, that clash, a synonym for a game, which is a
term relatively frequently used by the British sportswriters, is non-existent
in the American FMRs). By contrast, only two linguistic metaphors from
this domain did not occur in the UK corpus.
Frame Semantics has already been applied in football language
research by Schmidt (2008). The researcher, drawing on the views of
Fellbaum (1990) and Fillmore et al. (2003), combined this framework with
the methodology of corpus linguistics in the construction of his German-
English-French online football dictionary called The Kicktionary
(available at http://www.kicktionary.de)..) As Schmidt (2008: 12) argues, “Frame
Semantics [...] is a means of relating linguistic items to one another
through knowledge about prototypical event structures. The entities in
which this knowledge is represented are called scenes and frames. The
domain of football is very well suited to illustrate and apply frame
semantic theory”.
For the purpose of the ensuing analysis, this approach will be
employed to explore the vocabulary range and semantic relationships
within two frames: SHOT and PASS (the most frequent types of episodes