The Conflictual Nature of Metaphors in Live Basketball Commentaries: A Corpus Driven Approach

The recent years mark a general tendency of metaphor analysis in the social world. Such ‘real world’ discourses as political, economic, educational, illness, art etc. have come into focus of cognitive metaphor researches. The current research addresses metaphor in sport discourse, or to be exact, in basketball discourse of the 2011 European Basketball Championship. A corpus of 46 559 words of transcribed live basketball commentaries was constructed and analysed using AntConc concordance program. The findings show that the most characteristic conceptual metaphor in the analysed discourse is the conflict metaphor. After distinguishing metaphorical expressions which draw from the domain of conflict, the scenario which the conflict metaphor follows was determined: fight, attack, defence, victory, defeat, belligerents, weapons and exerting force, aggression, threat. Although most metaphorical expressions used in the analysed discourse are highly conventionalized and naturally comprehended as basketball terminology without realizing that there is close correlation between basketball and war, we cannot downplay their influence on the spectators’ subconscious minds. Extremely frequent use of the conflict metaphor is aimed at arousing the spectators’ emotions, or pathos, according to Aristotle. The commentator’s function is to affect the spectators and make them a part of the basketball game.