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In:Metaphor in Specialist Discourse:
Edited by J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber Sardinha
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 4] 2015
► pp. 101–130

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They have to die for the goals

WAR metaphors in English and German football radio commentary

Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.4.05tha
Many central items in football terminology are conspicuously metaphorical, for example shoot, attack or German schießen, angreifen. Yet, the role played by metaphor in football vocabulary has attracted little attention so far. This chapter presents a corpus-based investigation of metaphor in football jargon. Two corpora of radio commentaries in English and German (approx. 100,000 words each) were examined for linguistic and conceptual metaphor. The objective of this study was to show that, despite a relatively straightforward relation between English terms and their German equivalents, English and German exhibit striking differences with regard to football is war, especially in terms of productivity. In order to verify this claim, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed to show how one source domain (war) can play different roles in the same specialist target domain (football) across languages.
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