Metaphors in Sports Newspaper Articles: Contrastive Study in Spanish, French and English

Abstract

This study aims to identify the metaphors that are most commonly used in a newspaper corpus of 150 sports articles found in the digital press. The corpus consists of 50 newspaper articles written in Spanish, French and English. We first of all identify the metaphors that are used in all three languages and, secondly, we distinguish those metaphors that are only used in one of the languages. Our goal is to contribute to contrastive studies and research into sports discourse. Based on our findings, we argue that there are specific semantic fields that are used by the sports journalists in a particular language in order to produce metaphors in their newspaper articles. However, there are also a diversity of metaphors that take advantage of mutual semantic fields in the three languages. Finally, there are also similar terms that are used in the three languages to describe equivalent sports realities.