The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
War metaphors have long been used in sports news reporting. In reality, war metaphors are also used commonly in daily conversations. The wide usage of war metaphors in sports news reporting is because the two domains (i.e. war and sports) are comparable to each other, thereby enabling the use...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/1/41185-156887-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | War metaphors have long been used in sports news reporting. In reality, war metaphors are
also used commonly in daily conversations. The wide usage of war metaphors in sports news
reporting is because the two domains (i.e. war and sports) are comparable to each other, thereby
enabling the use of war terms to describe the sports domain. Following a corpus-informed
approach, the strength of modifiers (adjectives) in reversing or retaining the polarity of war
metaphors and subsequently affecting news sentiment was examined. Sports news from the
BBC Sports News, Malay Mail Online and the Malaysian Online Sports News Corpus, which
amounted to 2.3 million words of sports texts, were subjected to corpus analysis. The UCREL
Semantic Analysis System identified possible war terms in the corpora and Collocate 2.0 was
used to locate adjectives and their respective collocates. Findings indicated that news writers
do not necessarily use adjectives as a tool to negate the positive sentiment of news or intensify
the negative sentiments. Instead, war metaphors collocated with particular modifiers resulted
in a good balance of sports news reported with a negative polarity, positive polarity or a neutral
tone. |
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