Commentary as Metaphorization: Conceptual Mappings in Football Discourse

Abstract

A highly interdisciplinary topic, metaphor has undergone a major paradigm shift since the 1980s, evolving from a trope confined to ornamental and stylistic functions to a fundamental cognitive and discursive mechanism deeply rooted in lived experience, thought, and language. It allows us to grasp complex abstractions through concrete and familiar concepts. Our reflection, within a multidimensional cognitive framework, explores French and Arabic metaphorical expressions from broadcasts of two football matches. Deliberately limited due to the qualitative methodology adopted, the corpus is analyzed in light of Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) model in order to show the role of conceptual metaphor in structuring sports discourse based on other experiential domains. The study revolves around the following question: how do metaphorical mappings contribute to the conceptualization and shaping of football commentary? The objective is to highlight how systematic correspondences between source domains such as war, life, death, or meteorology and the target domain of soccer contribute to the construction of meaning, the intensification of discourse, and the creation of a collective imagination of the game, thus revealing the cognitive, discursive, and cultural significance of these mechanisms. Commentators make extensive use of metaphorical language to avoid monotony, enrich their narration, and reinforce the impact of their words. The analysis reveals that conceptual metaphors structure football discourse by projecting complex cultural and social representations onto it. They are not simply a play on words but reflect a mental structure that allows us to think about and feel the sport through images drawn from other spheres of human experience.