The Polarity of War Metaphors in Sports News: A Corpus-Informed Analysis

Authors

  • Kim Hua Tan Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3787-5006
  • Hamdi Khalis International Islamic University College of Selangor
  • Nur Ehsan Mohd. Said Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
  • Song Howe Ong Ganter Management and Consultancy Sdn. Bhd

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2021-2102-13

Keywords:

war metaphors, news sentiment, adjectives, collocation, sports corpus

Abstract

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. 

Author Biographies

Kim Hua Tan, Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Tan, Kim Hua (Ph.D) , is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Her research interests are in corpus-based research, corpus lexicography and the social impact of higher education in society. She currently leads the  journal of Higher Education and Oriental Studies. 

Hamdi Khalis, International Islamic University College of Selangor

Hamdi Khalis is a lecturer at International Islamic University College of Selangor. He was conferred the Masters in English Language Studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. 

Nur Ehsan Mohd. Said, Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Nur-Ehsan Mohd-Said is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He obtained his Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. His research interests include language attitude, differentiated instruction, and classroom research in an ESL setting.  

Song Howe Ong, Ganter Management and Consultancy Sdn. Bhd

Ong Song Howe is the Executive Director of Ganter Management and Consultancy Sdn. Bhd.

References

Ang, L. H., & Tan, K. H. (2016). Preposition-Related Collocation use among British and Malaysian Learners: A Corpus Analysis. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 24, 145-156.

Bing, L., Minqing, H., & Junsheng, C. (2005). Opinion Observer: Analyzing and Comparing Opinions on the Web. Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web conference. https://doi.org/10.1145/1060745.1060797

Bryant, J., Comisky, P., & Zillmann, D. (1977). Drama in Sports Commentary, Journal of Communication. 27(3), 140-149.

Bryant, J., Brown, D., Comisky, P. W., & Zillman, D. (1982). Sports and Spectators. Commentary and Appreciation, Journal of Communication. 32(1), 109-119.

Chapanga, E. (2004). An analysis of the war metaphors used in spoken commentaries of the 2004 edition of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) matches in Zimbabwe. Zambezia. 31(1/2), 62-71.

Comisky, P., Bryant, J. & Zillmann, D. (1977). Commentary as a Substitute for Action, Journal of Communication. 27(3), 150-153.

Fatemeh, S., Imran-Ho, A. & Norsimah, M. A. (2014). Cultural Basis of Metaphors Translation: Case of Emotions in Persian and English. Asian Social Science. 10(7), 107-118.

Hang, S. (2015). Judgement and adjective complementation patterns in biographical discourse: A corpus study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Ito, T. A., Larsen, J.T., Smith, N.K., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1998) Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: the negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. J Pers Soc Psychol. 75(4), 887-900. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.75.4.887

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. The Journal of Philosophy. 77(8), 453-486.

Leetaru, K. H. (2015). Mining libraries: Lessons learned from 20 years of massive computing on the world’s information. Information Services & Use. 35, 31-50.

Lehrer, A. (1974). Semantic fields and lexical structure. American Elsevier.

Mahmoud, A. & Imran-Ho, A. (2016). The Impact of Output Communication on EFL Learners’ Metaphor Second Language Acquisition. The Social Sciences. 11(9), 1940-1947.

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2003). The Language of Evaluation. Palgrave Macmillan.

Namrata, G., Manjunath, S., & Skiena, S. (2007). Large-Scale sentiment analysis for news and blogs. International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 7(21), 219-222.

Nasir, N., Gottron, T., Kunegis, J., & Arifah, C. A. (2011). Bad news travel fast: A content-based analysis of interestingness on twitter. Proceedings of the 3rd international web science conference, ACM WebSci '11.

Peterson, E. M., & Raney, A. A. (2008) Reconceptualizing and reexamining suspense as a predictor of mediated sports enjoyment, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 52(4), 544-562.

Raney, A. A. & Kinnally, W. (2009). Examining Perceived Violence and Enjoyment of Televised Rivalry Sports Contests. Mass Communication & Society. 12(3), 311-331

Ravichandran, V. (2011). Metaphors as Ideological Constructs for Identity in Malaysian Short Stories. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. 17 (Special Issue), 99-107.

Sareh, J., Imran-Ho, A. & Ravichandran, V. (2015). A Traveler in God’s Path: Sufi Words and the Metaphor of Journey. Asian Social Science. 11(16), 160-167.

Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. J., Herrmann, B. J., Kaal, A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Converging evidence in Language and Communication Research, 14. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Soomin, K., & Hovy, E. H. (2006). Extracting opinions, opinion holders, and topics expressed in online news media text. SST '06: Proceedings of the Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text.

Soroka, S. N. (2002). Issue Attributes and Agenda-Setting by Media, the Public, and Policymakers in Canada. International Journal of Public Opinion Research. 14(3), 264-285.

Sun, L. (2010). A cognitive study of war metaphors in five main areas of everyday English: Politics, Business, Sport, Disease and Love. Sweden: Högskolan Kristianstad, Sektionen för Lärarutbildning

Tan, K. H., Mohammad, Abdollahi-Guilani, & Fatin Nazihah Ahamad Rusly. (2017). Negativity as Criteria for Newsworthiness in Malaysian Newspaper Sports Corpus. Malaysian Journal of Communication, 33(2), 105-119.

Xian, Z. (2017). A comparative study of war metaphors in English and Chinese business media discourse. Master dissertation, Lingnan University. Retrieved from http://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_etd/13/

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2021-05-31

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 2 (2021): May 2021

Section

Articles

License

If the article is accepted for publication, copyright of this article will be vested to UKM Press, National University of Malaysia (UKM).

All articles published in this journal are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, unless otherwise stated.