Sport Metaphors

1.Introduction

I believe that a journalist's work revolves around making an event, place or a story alive and real for the reader, and for a sport-journalist, it is even more important to captivate your readers, and try to share those emotions and feelings that arouse whereas engaging in sports, and this is were the role of metaphors enter. I consider metaphors as one of the most powerful tools a sport-journalist can have, as with a metaphor, a writer can express an event in sports that really cannot be explain. However; in sport journalism, and especially in football-journalism, there is a heavily solid male reign, and I find it interesting to investigate whether male and female writers use the same expressions or not in such a male dominated sphere.

2. Background

A metaphor can be described as being an expression or a word, used to describe something abstract, even though it carries a different literal meaning. It is a comparison between two different things, which simplifies the meaning in an expression or a word, e.g.:

(1) He's a dark horse in this competition. (Andersson, 2011, p.2)

Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnsson (2003:5) claims, 'The essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another'. In Lakoff's (1992) work, Contemporary theory of metaphor Lakoff presents the idea of conceptual metaphors, which are general mappings across conceptual domains. He explains that we understand one conceptual domain in terms on another, and these are called source domain and target domain, which together create a mapping. The source domain is the conceptual domain we draw metaphorical expressions from and the target domain is the conceptual domain we try to understand, for example, using one person's life experiences to understand a different persons experience. One of these metaphors Lakoff and Johssson explains is, 'theories/arguments are buildings' (Johnstone, 2008, p.47), and are conveyed with expressions like these:

(2) Is that the foundation for your theory?

(3) The argument collapsed?

In practice of language there are many differences between male and female speakers and writers, and this is of course comprehensive and there are always expectations but most of us do convey the male and female language differently. Some examples of differences are that men speak of one issue at a time and use impartial language, while woman can deal with different topics simultaneously and are often very subjective in their choice of words (Björk, 2006, p 7). Furthermore, there has yet not been any convincing theories that claims or indicates directly stylistic distinctions between men's and woman's sentences, but there are clear agreements of masculine and feminine style which any writer, man or female, can adapt to (Holmes, Meyerhoff, 2005, p.156).

3. Design of the present study

3.1 Aim and research questions

The aim of this paper is to investigate the usage of metaphors in football-journalism in Sweden based on a gender aspect. In order to achieve this, the following research questions are addressed:

➢ Do female football-journalists differ in usage of metaphors from men?

➢ What are possible explanations for differences, if any, in usage of metaphors between female- and male football-journalists?

3.3 Data

I am going to concentrate on four Swedish football articles, written in Swedish, published online on two different sites. Two chronicles (article 1 and 2) from Anja Gatu; a female sport-journalist who writes for Sydsvenskan, and two articles (article 3 and 4) from Olof Lundh; a male sport-journalist who writes for Fotbollskanalen. Each chronicle is about 600- to 850 words.

The material is gathered from two Swedish webpages; Sydsvenskan and Fotbollskanalen. The chosen data from each writer is chosen from two topics; the Swedish National football team and Malmö FF, which is a football club in the highest league in Sweden.

3.2 Method

I am conducting a qualitative analysis. I will concentrate on the metaphors I find relevant for my research for further analyse. I will analyse the metaphors in terms of what they mean and how they form the text. I will also discuss if there is a difference or not in usage of metaphors. I will translate the metaphors into English by using both 'direct translations' and 'indirect translations'.

4. Results

As a result of locating all the metaphors in all four articles, I found that there where more metaphors used in the articles written by the male sport-journalist, hence, there were repetitions of the same metaphors and additionally more metaphors that were directly connected to sport, such as:

[M]

(4) vändningen mot Turkiet borta

the turn against Turkey away

(5) rensning rakt ut i planen

clearing straight out in the field

The female sport-journalist discussed politics in her articles, whereas the male sport-journalist concentrated on the issue of matter- football. She used metaphors to illustrate and compare politics and football;

[F]

(6) Och jag vet att Zlatans frånvaro redan börjat diskuteras i inskränkta janteälskade vrår av vårt land.

And I know that Zlatans absence already has been discussed in the restrained Jantelaw-fanatic areas in our country.

(7) Sverigedemokraternas framfart och en syndabock att skylla på.

The Swedish-democrats rush forward and a scapegoat to blame

A common characteristic found in the data for both female and male writers were conceptual metaphors in the category, 'happy is up/sad is down'. The metaphors are used to enhance negative and positive aspects of the issue in matter. Below are some examples listed;

[F]

(8) ramsor som sparkar nedåt

chants that are pointing downwards

(9) stå upp for alla människors rätt

stand