Chapter Four
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- All the talk had been about putting an end to tiki-taka and seizing Madrid
by the throat. (IND)
Compared to their American colleagues, the British sportswriters are
more inclined to use specialist terminology when reporting key episodes.
The following examples describe the same goalscoring situation:
- The Dutch were plunged further into disarray when Gomez struck his
second after 38 minutes – again from a slide-rule pass from his Bayern
Munich team-mate Schweinsteiger, which he curled across Stekelenburg
and just inside the far post. (EXP) - Gomez and Schweinsteiger outplayed the Dutch defense with two simple
moves. Gomez passed the ball to Schweinsteiger, who immediately
played it into space for Gomez and the striker slotted inside the far post.
(USA) - The episode is construed more explicitly in the USA Today report. The first
sentence profiles the main actors involved: the goalscorer (Gomez) and his
assistant (Schweinsteiger), and announces that two passes (“two moves”)
led to Gomez’s goal: Gomez’s pass to Schweinsteiger and
Schweinsteiger’s pass to Gomez. The latter is described by the clause who
immediately played it into space for Gomez, whose British equivalent in
the above pair of examples is the specialist term slide-rule pass. To a
neutral reader, the American description seems easier to process.^9 - Finally, in the British FMRs that have been investigated in the present
study, there are several examples of conceptual metaphors that serve as
discourse-framing devices (cf. Charteris-Black 2004; Semino 2008), and
can be regarded as another marker of implicitness. In the US corpus, only
one such metaphor was identified. With their linguistic realizations
distributed in various sections of text, these metaphors contribute to textual
cohesion as their conceptual basis is sustained across sentence boundaries.
The following extract from the Daily Express report of the Monaco vs.
Arsenal game is a good example of this phenomenon. The boldfaced
metaphorical expressions can be subsumed under the conceptual metaphor
AN ENTERTAINING FOOTBALL GAME IS AN ACTION MOVIE,
which echoes KĘvecses’ (2005) LIFE IS A SHOW metaphor.^10 - ARSENAL embarked on Mission Impossible last night and put up a fight
Tom Cruise would have been proud of. Ironically, the latest film in the
(^9) This pair of examples shows that a more specific reference (in this case the
specialist term slide rule pass) does not always result in greater explicitness. In this
respect, I share the views of Kamenická (2007: 48), who discusses the explicitation
hypothesis in the context of translation studies.
(^10) In match reports, a football game is sometimes conceptualized as a spectacle or a
theater performance (Lewandowski 2012). This conceptualization results from the
fact that play is one of the key verbs in the domains of football and theater.