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...

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Main Authors: Tan, Kim Hua, Hamdi Khalis, Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said, Ong, Song Howe
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2021
Online Access:http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/1/41185-156887-1-PB.pdf
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author Tan, Kim Hua
Hamdi Khalis,
Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said,
Ong, Song Howe
author_facet Tan, Kim Hua
Hamdi Khalis,
Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said,
Ong, Song Howe
author_sort Tan, Kim Hua
building UKM Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description 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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spelling oai:generic.eprints.org:172652021-08-03T06:10:38Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/ The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis Tan, Kim Hua Hamdi Khalis, Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said, Ong, Song Howe 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. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2021-05 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/1/41185-156887-1-PB.pdf Tan, Kim Hua and Hamdi Khalis, and Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said, and Ong, Song Howe (2021) The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis. GEMA ; Online Journal of Language Studies, 21 (2). pp. 238-252. ISSN 1675-8021 https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1397
spellingShingle Tan, Kim Hua
Hamdi Khalis,
Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said,
Ong, Song Howe
The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title_full The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title_fullStr The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title_full_unstemmed The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title_short The polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
title_sort polarity of war metaphors in sports news: a corpus-informed analysis
url http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17265/1/41185-156887-1-PB.pdf