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Source: Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis

Location: Poland
Author(s): Daniela Katunar, Ida Raffaelli
Title: A discourse approach to conceptual metaphors: a corpus-based analysis of sports discourse
in croatian
A discourse approach to conceptual metaphors: a corpus-based analysis of sports discourse
in croatian
Issue: 2/2016
Citation Daniela Katunar, Ida Raffaelli. "A discourse approach to conceptual metaphors: a corpus-
style: based analysis of sports discourse in croatian". Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae
Cracoviensis 2:125-147.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=476132
CEEOL copyright 2019

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 133 (2016): 125–147

doi:10.4467/20834624SL.16.010.5156

IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

University of Zagreb
[email protected], [email protected]

A DISCOURSE APPROACH TO CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS:
A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF
SPORTS DISCOURSE IN CROATIAN

Keywords: conceptual metaphors, discourse analysis, specialized digitized corpora,

Croatian language

Abstract
This paper deals with the analysis of sports discourse in Croatian through the theoreti-
cal framework offered by conceptual metaphor theory. Within this framework, certain
metaphorical expressions found in sports discourse are analyzed as expressions of two
conceptual metaphors: sport is war and sport is force. The analysis of these meta-
phorical expressions combines the methodology of cognitive linguistics with corpus
linguistics, resulting in the proposal of a new method for discourse analysis in general.
In our research, we introduce the notion of the specialized digitized corpus as a basis
for further quantitative and qualitative research. On the basis of the specialized digi-
tized corpus created for the purposes of this research, it is shown how the formation of
sports discourse is dependent on three categories of metaphorical expressions relative
to the degree of their conventionalization within sports discourse: (a) conventionalized,
(b) semi-conventionalized, and (c) innovative metaphorical expressions. Each of these
categories is analyzed according to their frequency and various aspects of meaning
that it entails. Through the introduction of the semi-conventionalized metaphorical
expression category, we aim to examine the gradable line between language creativity
and conventionality as it is formed within the discourse of sports.

1. Introduction

Discourse as a complex structure of an utterance is a site where social forms of organi-

zation engage with systems of signs in the production of texts, thus reproducing or

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126 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

changing the sets of meanings and values which make up a culture (Hodge, Cress 1988).
From today’s perspective discourse analysis is undoubtedly regarded as a method which
provides insight into structures of knowledge and the speaker’s understanding of
the world. On the other hand, discourse not only reflects the speaker’s knowledge of the
world, but also actively builds the person’s identity in his or her cultural environment.
Discourses are not about objects; they constitute them (Foucault 1972). It is through
discourse that meanings, subjects, and subjectivities are formed (Wright 2000).
Discourse analysis distinguishes between two types of context, as suggested by
Malinowski (1923), who separated the context of situation from the context of culture.
The context of situation refers to the structure of the immediate situation in which
an utterance takes place and which a speaker must be familiar with in order to un-
derstand a particular instance of language properly. Context of culture, on the other
hand, represents the broader structure of a culture a speaker must know in order to
understand what is said or written (cf. Lee, Poyton 2000).
In view of these two definitions, it is obvious that every study of a discourse must
include an analysis of the context of situation as well as an analysis of the context of
culture. The former is necessary in determining the immediate content of a message
that the hearer can decode from an utterance. The latter is essential because every
specific discourse is situated within a cultural context, and thus a speaker must de-
code not only the immediate content of a message but also the structures of a specific
context of culture. It is thus necessary to regard every discourse as a complex structure
of knowledge shared by the speakers of a specific culture.
Although the importance of sports can be seen on many levels of everyday life,
we are mostly interested in the linguistic aspects of sports, specifically the discourse
practices that surround it. Papers dealing with linguistic phenomena in sports dis-
course view sport mostly as a source domain used to understand other domains of
human activities, such as the media and politics (cf. Blain, Boyle, O’Donnell 1993;
Bairner 2001; Callies 2011). They also view sport as a domain that actively shapes
the cultural identity of a speech community. Callies (2011), for instance, analyzes the
degree to which various metaphors used in American popular sports (such as base-
ball) form various aspects of American culture and identity on the basis of the
conceptual metaphor life is a game.
This paper has a somewhat different way of approaching the subject of metaphors
related to the sports domain. We will not regard sports as a source domain but con-
versely as a target domain. Our goal is thus to analyze the basic domains that form
our understanding of sports as a part of our culture. If we go back to Malinowski’s
definition of the context of culture, it becomes clear that an analysis of sports dis-
course will enable us to extrapolate important elements of the context of culture
a certain discourse is related to. Furthermore, since the context of culture is essen-
tially a complex structure of knowledge, an analysis of sports discourse will enable
us to describe conventional knowledge about sports that we all share as members
of a specific culture.
We also intend to show how these parts of background knowledge participate in
the formation of sports discourse. Furthermore, we believe that a careful examination

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of metaphorical expressions in sports discourse will contribute to the study of con-

ventionalized and innovative metaphors as gradable categories and their mutual
interaction within a discourse. We assume that some of our conclusions might be
relevant for the broader Western context of culture being background knowledge
for sports discourse shared by different but related speech communities.
The discourse approach to conceptual metaphors we propose is based on building
and analyzing a specialized digitized corpus (henceforth SDC) of texts exclusively
related to the sports domain.
Since the main goal of the proposed analysis is to define how metaphors consti-
tute knowledge about sports in Croatian culture and how they are used to convey
this knowledge in sports discourse, the SDC offers many benefits for this kind of
research, which will be pointed to in the next sections.

2.  Conceptual metaphors, discourse and culture

Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we live by (1980), concep-
tual metaphors have been one of the main topics in cognitive linguistics. They have
been studied from various perspectives that include philosophical, cross-linguis-
tic, grammatical, corpus, cognitive, and psycholinguistic approaches (e.g. Lakoff,
Johnson 1980; Langacker 1987; Lakoff, Turner 1989; Žic Fuchs 1992; Mahon 1999;
Steen 1999; Kö­ve­cses 2000; Johnson, Lakoff 2002; Kövecses, Palmer, Dirven 2003;
Charteris-Black 2004; Deignan 2005; Steen 2007; Stanojević 2013). Many works
in cognitive linguistics deal with the way in which conceptual metaphors reflect
knowledge and reveal a view of the world as constructed by a specific culture.
An analysis of conceptual metaphors contributes to the understanding of the cul-
ture itself (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Sweetser 1990; Kövecses 2005).
The initial thesis of this paper is that conceptual metaphors can be viewed as
knowledge structures that are integral to a culture. This means that defining meta-
phors within a discourse presupposes a reconstruction of conventional knowledge
characteristic of a certain speech community. Methodologically, this means that
an analysis of metaphors in the discourse provides an insight into the metaphorical
structures of the context of culture.
Therefore, we assume that the analysis of metaphors in sports discourse ena-
bles a reconstruction of metaphorically based knowledge of sports in the Croatian
speech community.
Parallel to this assumption is another aspect of metaphorical discourse for-
mation. The thesis that every context of culture is metaphorically structured is
similar to Lakoff’s thesis that speakers metaphorically understand and structure
every situation (Lakoff 1990). According to Lakoff (1990), metaphorical structuring
of situation consists of two parts. The first part is made up of a relatively stable set
of metaphors that determine our view of a situation, while the second part is actu-
ally our ability to apply these metaphors when communicating about that situation.
Furthermore, the speaker is able to linguistically form these metaphors in different

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128 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

ways. It is thus necessary to find and analyze different expressions that function in
a discourse as different facets of the same conceptual metaphor. Lakoff’s thesis can
be incorporated into our analysis of metaphors in sports discourse as well as any
other type of discourse. It relates to the fact that discourse reflects the way we view
a specific situation. Conversely, the principles of the metaphorical understanding
of a situation build and shape the discourse itself.
In our research we will discuss two conceptual metaphors which in different ways
shape the sports discourse in Croatian. These are sport is war and sport is force.1
Defining these two conceptual metaphors as very relevant for the sports discourse
in Croatian was a result of a careful examination of a specialized digitized corpus
of sports texts and the observation of lexical units which systematically draw their
meaning from the same source domains. In English, for instance, lexemes such
as offense, defense and shooter also show systematic relations with the notion of
conflict (i.e. war), each in their own way (through the notions of “attack”, “defense”
and “attacker”, respectively). Also, in expressions such as
(1) Ljubo srušio Nadala (SDC, www.vecernji.hr)
‘Ljubo knocked down Nadal’ (tennis)

the notion of “force” is used to denote the victory of one tennis player over the other.
Many verbs used in these context, such as potopiti ‘to sink’, pomesti ‘to sweep up’,
otpuhati ‘to blow away’ refer to some kind of animate or inanimate agency (the sea,
a person handling a broom and the wind, respectively) exerting force over another
entity. Put together they point out that metaphorical links are not only confined to
individual lexemes, but that their metaphorical use in the sports discourse relies
on a wider background conceptual structure that links the two domains and that
structure, i.e. a conceptual metaphor. This is the reason we can find many different
lexical units related to the same source domain. We must point out that although it is
possible to analyze various scenarios related to different sports, our goal was to estab-
lish broad conclusions about the structure of the domain of sports in Croatian within
the limits of one paper, and for this reason we discuss the sports domain as a whole,
and put forth the two conceptual metaphors as an important part of that whole.
It is also important to point out that the analysis of particular lexical units as
metaphorical within our corpus was made by cross-referencing existing Croatian
dictionaries.2 For instance, the lexeme napad ‘attack; offense’ has the following senses
listed in Anić (1996): (a) an act of aggression with the intent of causing physical or
psychological harm; (b) a short physical or psychological disturbance (e.g. napad
kašlja ‘a cough attack’) and (c) a sports action with the goal of achieving a score.
The lexicographic data therefore points to its metaphorical meaning in the do-
main of sports.

1
Based on the analysis of metaphorical instantiation in sports discourse, it has become evident
that the largest number of examples belong to these two conceptual metaphors. Some meth-
odological details will be given in the sections that follow.
2
Anić (1996) and Šonje (2000).

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Therefore, we intend to (a) analyze expressions that are related to either of the two
conceptual metaphors within sports discourse, (b) point out how sports discourse
is in large part shaped on a different degree of inclusion and linguistic instantiation
of these metaphors, and, consequently, (c) to give a classification of metaphorical
expressions based on different qualitative and quantitative criteria.3

3.  Discourse analysis and corpora

In her book Metaphor and corpus linguistics (2005), Deignan points to differ-
ences between the cognitive and discourse approaches to metaphor research,4
stressing the existence of two different discourse approaches to metaphor re-
search. The cognitive approach analyzes speech or writing of a particular text-
type, generally with the agenda of showing how metaphors are used to present
a particular message or ideology. The discourse approach, represented by a smaller
group, looks at how speakers use metaphor to develop shared understanding as
a spoken discourse unfolds. What the two approaches share is the close analysis
of text as a product.
The discourse approach to metaphor research that we propose is somewhat
different from those described by Deignan (2005).5 In a way, it has some common
features with the cognitive approach, since the main intention of the proposed dis-
course analysis is to define how metaphors are used in line with knowledge about
a certain human activity and how they are used to convey this knowledge through
discourse communicating this specific activity. However, methodologically it
proposes some new procedures for discourse analysis and for metaphor research
as related to discourse analysis.

3
One could analyze both the source and the target domain in detail but we decided to delimit
our research in two ways: (a) give an overview of the sports domain in general, not particular
sports, e.g. tennis vs football etc. and (b) examine texts that describe the competition aspect
of sports, i.e. the game itself, and not for instance the politics of sports (such as player tranfers
and the like).
4
Deignan (2005: 123) points to two basic differences between the discourse and the cognitive
approach to metaphor research. First, the discourse approach tends to take Conceptual
Metaphor Theory as a starting point and does not attempt to test the theory itself. The main
intention of this approach is to see how speakers create meaning using metaphor as a tool.
Second, the discourse approach is based on naturally occurring texts and therefore does
not ask speakers for any metalinguistic interpretation of their own utterances. Speakers
are not supposed to invent sentences not produced in natural linguistic and extralinguis-
tic circumstances.
5
Cameron and Deignan (2003) and Charteris-Black (2004) conducted their research on meta-
phors on small corpora that were either hand-sorted corpora or a sample gathered from a larger
corpus. Both corpus approaches to metaphors were based on searching data by hand. It has
to be pointed out that Cameron and Deignan’s small corpus consists of 28,285 words and that
it consists of transcribed talk in a primary school in the UK. The large corpus consists of the
9-million-word collection of spoken data from the section of the Bank of English. Cameron
and Deignan’s corpora were not specialized corpora, whereas Charteris-Black’s corpus was
topically related to 9/11 and especially to the metaphorical use of the word crusade.

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130 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

3.1.  Building a specialized digitalized corpus for discourse analysis purposes

The main benefits of building an SDC for discourse analysis purposes is the pos-
sibility for a researcher to do the following:
1. constitute a corpus based on texts that are of special interest to his or her re-
search. Since a specialized corpus is a corpus of domain-related texts, it can give
us a coherent overview of the sports discourse as a whole because it serves as
a representative sample of the entire discourse;
2. define the extent as well as the structure of the corpus.6 It provides insight into
a considerable amount of most recent sports-related texts that cannot be obtained
any other way, except for manually searching articles on the Web;7
3. conduct a statistical analysis of a certain linguistic phenomenon within a dis-
course. An SDC is more easily manageable in terms of the statistical analysis of
frequencies, especially with respect to the analysis of metaphorical expressions.

Furthermore, this methodology significantly differs from the methodology proposed

by Charteris-Black (2004), who restricts a general corpus for discourse analysis
purposes to texts related to a certain domain.8 A convenient aspect of this method-
ology is that a general corpus serves as a control corpus. However, his findings on
metaphorical expressions are based on a manually conducted collection of metaphors
from several small corpora extracted from a general corpus. An SDC is built by
a researcher interested in texts related to a certain domain and collected from the
Web. However, a main disadvantage of such a corpus would be the necessity that
texts are available on the Internet, i.e. that they are digitally processed.
In building our SDC, we used the BootCat (short for Bootstraping Corpora
and Terms from the Web) tool engine to gather and sample texts from the Internet.
BootCat is a recently published software that collects various texts from the Inter-
net and builds a corpus through a set of instructions provided by the researcher
(for a detailed description, see http://bootcat.ssmlt.unibo.it). These instructions can
be modified according to the type of corpus a researcher is interested in. In our case,
we wanted to get the most recent synchronic overview of sports discourse. Also, we
wanted to further restrict our search only to highly relevant sports related texts,
so we gathered articles from newspaper portals of Jutarnji list, Večernji list and
Sportske novosti.9 This means that we were interested primarily in texts describing

6
Building specialized corpora leaves it up to researchers to define how large the corpus should
be and what kind of texts it should consist of.
7
The Croatian National Corpus ver. 2.0, a large, 100-million-word general corpus, has a limited
overview of sports-related texts, none of which are more recent than 2005.
8
Methodologically, it is not clear enough whether the extracted texts form separately man-
ageable small corpora. From a corpus linguistic point of view, this should be an important
methodological question. Since there are no statistical data (even the size of the small corpora
is not mentioned) we assume that these were not separately manageable small corpora.
9
We wanted to collect texts that are explicitly part of public communication about sports. We there-
fore decided not to include texts from forums and blogs, though these could be added in further
analysis. Judging by the number of readers and their overall popularity, these are the most
influential newspapers and magazines in Croatia.

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sports competitions, and not peripheral topics such as transfers of football players
in order to delimit our research. The corpus contains 1,195,883 tokens. From a corpus
linguistics point of view, this is considered a small corpus sufficient and relevant
(Sinclair 2001) for this type of research. It can also be expanded by adding new texts
if the need arises.
In this respect our methodology is more in line with the research conducted by
Skorczynska and Deignan (2006) on metaphors in the economical domain. Skor­
czyn­ska and Deignan (2006) compiled their texts from two journals dealing with
economical topics, one in a scientific and the other a popular way, in order to com-
pare the two periodicals and draw conclusions on their functions in the economical
discourse. However, there are a few differences between our approach and the one
made by Skorczynska and Deignan. Whereas the comparison made by Skorczynska
and Deignan is made between two already specialized corpora our comparison will
be based between the SDC and a general corpus of Croatian. Also, our work results
in formulating two salient conceptual metaphors in the sports discourse and their
comparison in terms of the degree of conventionality, whereas Skorczynska and
Deignan focus more on the metaphor vehicles stemming from various domains with-
out positing conceptual metaphors in terms of x is y (e.g. sport is war). Our spe-
cialized digitized corpus is furthermore compiled and processed semi-automatically
from a variety of texts gathered from general newsportals, not specialized sport
periodicals.

4.  Classification of metaphors

Implementation of a corpus-based analysis of sports discourse is especially useful

for examining and studying metaphorical linguistic expressions as instantiations
of the conceptual metaphors sport is war and sport is force. As we have already
pointed out, these two conceptual metaphors are highly representative in the SDC
via diverse linguistic instantiations, but with different frequencies, which further
confirms our initial thesis of their different salience and relevance not only in
sports discourse but in construing knowledge about sports as part of the context
of culture as well.
This brings us to another important aspect of this study. Since we stressed that
our discourse approach to metaphor research is similar to that of scholars who are
interested in use of metaphors in communicational purposes as conveying knowl-
edge structure about something in the world, an SDC can provide some interesting
statistically supported evidence about the linguistic instantiations of metaphors.
An overview of the SDC revealed that conceptual metaphors SPORT IS WAR and
SPORT IS FORCE participate on different levels and with differing frequency based on
their linguistic instantiations in sports discourse.10 With respect to their linguistic

According to Kövecses (2000), source domains of WAR and FORCE are separate but closely
10

related conceptual domains. This relation can be illustrated by words such as demolition and

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132 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

instantiation, these two conceptual metaphors are not conventionalized to the same
degree. Based on these observations, we propose three different levels of their instan-
tiations which determine the linguistic actualization of any conceptual metaphor,
not just of the ones studied in this paper. These are (a) conventionalized metaphors,
(b) semi-conventionalized metaphors, and (c) innovative metaphors.
Authors usually talk about the gradability or the continuum between conven-
tionalized and innovative metaphors because the degree of conventionalization can
be determined on various levels (e.g. Žic Fuchs 1992; Deignan 2005; Kövecses 2002;
Stanojević 2013).11 The proposed classification of conventionalized metaphors in this
paper differs in part from other classifications (cf. Deignan 2005). It is our opinion
that metaphor research based on searching an SDC could provide some new evidence
in the principles by which metaphors structure (sports) discourse. In the following
sections we will examine the criteria of our classification in more detail. We believe
that with this kind of classification of metaphors we will be able to (a) demonstrate
the various degrees of their inclusion in sports discourse and (b) contribute to a more
systematic reconstruction of the context of culture of sports discourse.
Therefore, we state that the intermediate category of semi-conventionalized meta-
phors is necessary for explaining more systematically the way conceptual metaphors
participate as background knowledge in the structuring of (sports) discourse.

4.1.  Criteria for the classification of metaphors

Our classification is based on several quantitative as well as qualitative criteria.12
These are (a) frequency of use, (b) affective markedness, and (c) individual use. Table 1.
shows the way these criteria participate in the classification of metaphors in the
sports discourse.

a) Frequency
Frequency of use is the most typical quantitative feature of an analyzed expression and
the only one of the three criteria that is related to quantitative analysis. The other two
criteria are related to the semantic features of the analyzed expression. Since our corpus

destruction, whose meanings are closely tied to both a WAR scenario and a scenario of exert-
ing FORCE. Such is the example of srušiti ‘destroy, tear down’, e.g. u ratu su srušeni mnogi
spomenici ‘many monuments were destroyed in the war’. Thus the lexical (sub)system related
to the two source domains of WAR and FORCE indeed serves as a window into the structure
of the underlying system of metaphors (see also Kövecses 1986). On the other hand, in our
research we also present arguments that support the division of the two conceptual metaphors
SPORT IS WAR and SPORT IS FORCE.
11
It is worth stressing that Žic Fuchs’ criteria for the classification of metaphors as conventional-
ized and innovative are strictly qualitative, whereas Deignan’s are a combination of qualitative
and quantitative criteria although it seems she considers them as separate entities and not
as a group.
12
Charteris-Black (2004) and Deignan (2005) point out that the corpus approach to metaphor
research provides us with a quantitative and qualitative analysis of linguistic data. Quantitative
analysis mostly deals with the frequency of an expression, and qualitative analysis deals with
its meaning.

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Conventionalized Semi-conventional- Innovative

metaphors ized metaphors metaphors
more than between less than
Frequency
100 tokens 100 and 10 tokens 10 tokens
Affective
– + +
markedness

Individual use – – +

Table 1. The classification of metaphorical expressions according to the presence of

several criteria. Frequency criteria is based on a one million token corpus.

is an SDC, the meaning issue of the expression does not concern the relation between
literal and metaphorical meaning since the analyzed expressions appearing in this SDC
are exclusively metaphorical. For example, in sports discourse, the word napad ‘offense;
lit. attack’ cannot appear in its literal meaning, but exclusively metaphorically. This is
because the SDC was manually checked after compiling to exclude examples such as,
for example, fights between football hooligans or players on the field, leaving only the
instances of “attacks” that refer to the game strategy. Therefore, our qualitative criteria
are related to the function certain expressions have in construing a discourse, their
additional semantic features, and individual and creative usage.
In view of our own classification, the research presented by Deignan (2005) was
of special interest to us. Deignan’s corpus research was based on the corpus analy-
sis of a general corpus of English (Bank of English). To demonstrate the frequency of
metaphorical uses of a certain linguistic expression, she uses the absolute frequency
approach (see Deignan 2005). This approach enables to determine the frequency of
metaphorical uses of a certain expressions with respect to literal uses and to the
total number of uses.13 However, frequency criteria are not equally essential for de-
termining conventionalized metaphors and innovative metaphors. Thus, Deignan
(2005: 40) determines innovative metaphors as those linguistic expressions where
a particular metaphor is found occurring less than once in every thousand citations
of the word form. On the contrary, frequency criteria are not relevant in determining
conventional metaphors; i.e. it seems that every expression found more than once
in every thousand citations of the word is a conventionalized metaphor. According
to Deignan (2005), conventionalized metaphors are dependent on a literal sense and
they tend to invoke at some level a literal counterpart.

In her research of the expression in the running Deignan (2005: 28–29) states that from a total
13

number of 124 citations, 61 citations are metaphorically motivated. However, the number of
metaphorical expressions could be considered larger with respect to the use of this expression
in the sports discourse where this expression is often used in a more general metaphorical
sense of competition.
It should be stressed that these data tell us nothing about the relevance of metaphorical
expressions structuring the discourse.

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134 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

If we look at Deignan’s criteria as applied to the definitions of conventionalized

and innovative metaphors, it is quite obvious how the two criteria (quantitative and
qualitative) are used independently to define the two categories of metaphors. Con-
sequently, they do not elaborate on the way innovative metaphors interact with
more conventionalized ones or the way one can observe and study the process of
conventionalization itself.14 We therefore decided to use mutually interacting criteria
in our analysis of metaphorical expressions. In this sense, they have to be taken into
consideration as a group, not separately. In this way, the degree of absence or pres-
ence of any of these three criteria is also indicative (a) of the values of the other two
criteria and (b) of the degree of conventionalization characteristic of a metaphorical
expression. As stated by Bybee and Hopper (2001), frequency is one of the factors
that conditions functional change of a word or any linguistic element. Although
their main focus is on grammaticalization, we think that frequency is inseparable
from the changes that could affect a certain word, such as its function in a discourse
or the (non)existence of certain semantic features.
For example, high frequency of use is indicative of the low affective markedness
of the metaphorical expression simply because a phrase heard quite often in the
same context does not have as strong an emotional impact on the hearer as does an
expression heard once or only a few times. Thus high frequency is in contrast with
the individual use of a word.
Whereas Deignan used absolute frequency as a criterion, we decided to use the
relative frequency approach instead, with some references to the absolute frequency
of the word when needed. Since relative frequency shows the number of times an ex-
pression appears in relation to the absolute number of tokens in a corpus, we believe
that it enables us to better examine the relation between a metaphorical expression
and a discourse in its entirety.15 High relative frequency of certain metaphorical
expressions is indicative of conventionalized metaphors and their importance in
constituting the sports discourse itself. Transitional stages with lower frequency
are in the same way indicative of semi-conventionalized metaphors which have
a lower impact in structuring a discourse but significantly higher than innova-
tive metaphors. It is important to stress that metaphorical expressions with lower
frequency are affectively more marked than those with a higher frequency status.

14
Deignan (2005: 40) stresses that all conventional linguistic metaphors must have been in-
novative at some point in history. Innovative language uses are related to individual creative
ad hoc uses of a language in a certain communicational situation. From a diachronic semantics
point of view, this is an important issue elaborated by cognitive linguists (Nerlich and Clarck
1988 and Györi 2002) as much as by structural linguists (Coseriu 1973) or the prestructural
linguist Sterne (1931). For more details see Raffaelli (2009).
15
It must be noted that such calculations are made much easier by the use of a specialized
corpus where one works with a smaller set of tokens and where the expressions are expected
to appear mainly in their metaphorical meaning pertaining to a single domain, in our case
sport. It is much harder, as Deignan shows, to hand-pick various metaphorical meanings one
by one from a general corpus. In other words, in a SDC related to the sports domain, we can
hardly expect that a word such as napad ‘attack; offense’ and obrana ‘defense’ would be used
in their literal meaning. Therefore, this methodology makes it much easier to define the ”real”
status of metaphorical expression in construing sports discourse.

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Finally, in accordance with Deignan’s definition, innovative metaphors appear rarely

and thus their relative frequency is negligible, though also indicative of their cat-
egory status.
Based on this observation and according to our analysis, a provisional frequency
limit between conventionalized and semi-conventionalized metaphorical expressions
is a frequency of 100 citations in the whole corpus of 1 195 883 tokens.16 The frequency
limits we suggest are in a way different from those proposed by Deignan (2005).
First, the criterion to determine innovative metaphors as those expressions which
appear in less than one citation in every thousand citations of the word form would
categorize all the metaphorical expressions in the SCD as innovative metaphors.17
This is also a matter of the small size of the SDC as compared to a general corpus.
Based on Deignan’s frequency limit, even the most frequent metaphorical expressions
in the SDC should therefore be classified as peripheral members between innovative
and conventionalized metaphorical expressions. Therefore, the frequency limits
we propose are adjusted to the absolute frequencies of the analyzed metaphorical
expressions in the SDC.
Since the main goal of the presented research is to determine to what degree
expressions belonging to different conceptual metaphors participate in construing
sports discourse in Croatian we propose the following frequency limits: (a) most
of expressions that are categorized as conventionalized metaphors appears in more
than 100 citations in the corpus,18 (b) expressions appearing in citations between
100 and 10 are categorized as semi-conventionalized, and (c) those expressions
that appear in less than 10 citations in a 1-million-word corpus are categorized as
innovative metaphors.

b) Affective markedness
The second criterion, affective markedness, is what Leech (1974) defines as affective
meaning, the type of meaning which includes the speaker’s attitudes and feelings
towards the thing he or she is talking about. Affective meaning is often explicitly
conveyed through the meaning of the words used. In discourse analysis, affective
meaning, or affective markedness in our terminology, can be correlated with a larger
degree of innovation of certain expressions in the discourse. The less frequent the
expression is, the less it is conventionalized and more it is affective. This is the part of
the discourse where variability and the speaker’s creativity come into play. Relatively
frequent expressions such as razbiti ‘to demolish’, slomiti ‘to break’, and zgaziti
‘to stamp out’ (an opponent) in the sense of to defeat an opponent all bring additional
semantic features to the utterance, intensifying the meaning of defeat and adding
certain emotional overtones to sports discourse. Affective markedness thus shows
us that such a metaphorical expression brings some additional semantic information
16
For the clarity of presentation, we will henceforth refer to the corpus as a one-million token corpus.
17
Its absolute frequency in the SDC is 1,439 citations.
18
The nonmetaphorical word utakmica ‘match’ appears 4,430 times. These are the two most
frequent expressions related to the sports domain and according to Deignan’s frequency limits,
hardly conventionalized.

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into the discourse in contrast to those expressions that are categorized as conven-
tionalized. Metaphorical expressions such as razbiti ‘to demolish’, slomiti ‘to break’,
and zgaziti ‘to stamp out’, with the meaning of to defeat an opponent, are more af-
fective than the expression pobijediti ‘to win’, which lacks any affective features
and is highly schematic.19 Such metaphorical expressions are less frequently used
than conventionalized metaphors. Therefore, they will be placed in the category of
semi-conventionalized metaphors.

c) Individual use
The third criterion is individual use, which simply refers to the uniqueness of the
expression the speaker uses, i.e. the speaker’s creativity. It correlates well with
the frequency criterion since expressions that could be defined as individual speak-
er’s use have very low frequency (less than 10 citations in the one-million-word
SDC), often highly affective and belong to the category of innovative metaphors.
As we will demonstrate in the sections to follow, innovative metaphors in sports
discourse exhibit some specific semantic and syntactic features that have to be
pointed out.
As mentioned previously, the three criteria are interrelated and do not form
absolute categories themselves. In other words, all three are also gradable in the
sense that, for instance, semi-conventionalized metaphors have a greater degree of
affective markedness and individual use than conventionalized metaphors, which
have none or close to none. But also, semi-conventionalized metaphors also have
a lower degree of affective markedness and individual use than innovative metaphors,
which in turn have both as their distinguishing features.
As will be pointed out, the categorization of metaphorical expressions should be
based on the interaction of all three criteria at the same time. Frequency as a quan-
titative criterion is relevant because it correlates significantly with some functional
changes of words in a discourse and their semantic features. It should be regarded
in interaction with the other two, qualitative criteria.

5.  Three types of metaphorical expressions

In this section we turn to look at the types of metaphorical expressions based on

their degree of conventionalization in sports discourse. As we have already stated,
our classification differs from existing classifications because it introduces a new
intermediate category between conventionalized and innovative metaphors, that of
semi-conventionalized metaphors.

19
pobijediti ‘to win’ has two senses in Anić (1996): a) to overcome an opponent and b) to contain
something or someone. Because it is highly schematic in its meaning we will use it as a refer-
ence point for the comparison of actual metaphorical extensions from the domain of WAR,
but it will not be itself analyzed as a metaphorical expression.

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5.1.  Conventionalized metaphors

Conventionalized metaphors form the backbone of sports discourse. They are an
essential part of the vocabulary used to talk about sports, and as such have very
high citation frequencies (see Table 2).20 If compared with the frequencies of semi-
conventionalized expressions (see Tables 3 and 4, below) it is obvious that frequencies
of conventionalized metaphors are significantly higher compared to those of semi-
conventionalized metaphors. The two most frequent metaphorical expressions are
osvojiti ‘to seize’ and dvoboj ‘duel’. The expression osvojiti appears in 983 citations
and dvoboj in 859 citations in the SDC.

No. of Relative
Metaphorical expressions
tokens frequency
osvojiti ‘to seize; to win’ 983 0.0825%
dvoboj ‘duel’ 859 0.0718%
obrana ‘defense’ 852 0.0717%
napad ‘offense’, lit. ‘attack’ 535 0.047%
napadač ‘striker’, lit. ‘attacker’ 525 0.044%
strijelac ‘shooter’ 506 0.0423%
izboriti lit. ‘fight out’ 482 0.0403%
savladati / svladati ‘overcome’ 442 0.0369%
izbaciti ‘throw out’ 125 0.0289%
obraniti ‘to defend’ 214 0.0178%
zaustaviti ‘stop’ 179 0.0149%
veteran ‘veteran’ 129 0.0107%

Table 2.  Conventionalized metaphors in SDC

Although a scalar structure of the category of conventionalized metaphor is pertinent

with respect to the frequency criterion, almost all of these conventionalized expres-
sions also function as key-words of the sports discourse. What we mean by key-word
function of certain metaphorical expressions will be explained in the next section.

5.2.  Conventionalized metaphors as key-words of sports discourse

The relevance of conventionalized metaphors for sports discourse is also seen in the
way they reveal important elements of the context of the culture of sports discourse.

20
The only two expressions with significantly lower frequencies are veteran ‘veteran’ and bunker
‘bunker, a style of defensive play’.

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It is through this perspective that they can be viewed as key-words of sports dis-
course. What is meant here by key-words is as Matoré defines them: “lexicological
units expressing a society… a person, a feeling, an idea which are alive insofar as
society recognizes in them its ideal,” (Matoré 1953: 68). An example of this is the
French term bourgeois, which according to Matoré (1953: 69) compiles the dominant
cultural meanings of its historical period.
Many studies based on Matoré’s assumptions deal with diachronic research whose
goal is to describe the dominant ideas of a certain historical period, an author’s work,
or a specialized historical activity (Ullmann 1962: 252–253). From a synchronic per-
spective, key-words were the subject of research lead by Wierz­bicka (1997), who based
her comparative cultural analysis on the discovery and analysis of culturally spe-
cific lexemes.
What both the diachronic and the synchronic approach have in common is the
wide scope of phenomena they include in their investigations. They both focus on
key-words that directly represent the society as a whole, extant in various discourse
practices and contexts. On the other hand, they exclude key-words that shape a single
discourse practice within a society. This way of approaching key-words is highly
important because we consider key-words as elements that represent the way speak-
ers view and understand a single activity which is the topic of a specific discourse.
It was thus our goal to limit ourselves to those words that can be interpreted as
key-words in sports discourse and which thus represent the core structure of the
context of culture involved in Croatian speakers’ understanding of sports. These key-
words are metaphorical instantiations of conceptual metaphors by which sports are
mostly conceptualized.21
Such is the example of izboriti finale lit. ‘fight out the final’. Even in cases where
this metaphorical expression can be substituted with another metaphorical expres-
sion based on another conceptual metaphor such as SPORT IS A JOURNEY, e.g. izboriti
finale lit. ‘fight out the final’ vs ući u finale ‘enter the final’, the metaphorical expres-
sion which is the instantiation of the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS WAR is seen
more frequently, having semantic features (such as endurance and supremacy over
the opponent) that the other metaphorical expression, ući u finale ‘enter the final’,
does not possess because it lacks the concept of ‘competition’ coded in the expres-
sion izboriti finale ‘fight out the final’.
Some other examples are expressions such as osvojiti ‘to seize’ (which occurs with
objects such as prvenstvo ‘championship’, zlatnu medalju ‘gold medal’, naslov prvaka
‘title’), izbaciti ‘to throw out (iz prvenstva ‘from the championship’, iz finala ‘from
the final’, iz natjecanja ‘from the competition’)’, obraniti ‘to defend (naslov ‘title’,
gol ‘the goal’)’ and strijelac ‘the shooter (pobjedničkog pogodka ‘of the winning shot’)’,
which also lexicalize some parts of sports competitions that are fundamental when
communicating about the sport and cannot be expressed in some other way. It is
impossible to refer to these events with any other lexical unit or expression, and
as such, they are affectively completely neutral.

21
Charteris-Black (2004: 37).

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Key-words are not marked for affective meaning and are not part of an indi-
vidual usage. To say that someone is a football veteran (nogometni veteran), will bear
no special unique meaning to the hearer and will be a common way to talk about
the persons denoted by the expression. It is clear that both of these metaphorical
expressions are taken from the domain of WAR, but through the process of con-
ventionalization they have lost semantic features related to the source domain and
formed new ones pertaining to the domain of sports. Thus, when we talk about
Davor Šuker as a football veteran, we do not think of a possibly troubled, physically
and psychologically scarred individual, but of an experienced retired sportsman
with notable prior achievements in his profession. These features – experience,
retirement, and earned appreciation – motivate the metaphorical meaning of the
lexeme veteran.
By defining conventionalized metaphors as key-words of sports discourse,
we point out the reciprocity of the context of culture and discourse as mediated
through the key-words of the discourse. This means that by examining the expres-
sions which are instantiations of the conceptual metaphors SPORT IS WAR and SPORT
IS FORCE, we are (a) examining the dominant ways in which sports are understood
and talked about in Croatian culture, i.e. (b) getting an insight into the background
knowledge that is fundamental in shaping sports discourse in Croatian.

5.3.  Semi-conventionalized metaphors

Semi-conventionalized metaphors are the intermediate and also the most unstable
category of metaphors in sports discourse. Their frequency is significantly lower
(less than 100 citations in the SDC) than that of conventionalized metaphors but
still relevant to their presence in sports discourse (see Tables 3 and 4).
The relation between the conventionalized and semi-conventionalized metaphors
can be viewed as highly indicative of the relation between the conceptual metaphors
SPORT IS WAR and SPORT IS FORCE. As both categories are instantiated through
relatively stable sets of lexemes, they are the ones which reveal most about the
metaphorical structures of the context of culture as background knowledge of
the sports discourse.
Almost all of the examples of conventionalized metaphors listed in table 2
are metaphorical expressions based on the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS WAR.
This shows us how deeply embedded the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS WAR is in
the Croatian sports discourse. If we return to our discussion of conventionalized
metaphors as key-words of the sports discourse it can be said that viewing sport
as WAR is one of the commonest ways of understanding sports in Croatian culture.
On the other hand, it is clear that the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE is not
as conventionalized in our understanding of sports as the conceptual metaphor
SPORT IS WAR is. This is seen in the fact that metaphorical expressions based on
the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE mostly fall within the category of semi-
conventionalized expressions (see Table 3 below). Verbs such as razbiti ‘to break;
to smash’, slomiti ‘to break’, srušiti ‘to knock over’, potopiti ‘to sink’ all refer to

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No. of Relative
Parasynonyms of ‘to win’
tokens frequency
razbiti ‘to break; to smash’ 98 0.0081%
pokoriti ‘to conquer’ 62 0.0051%
potopiti ‘to sink’ 45 0.0037%
poraziti ‘to defeat’ 35 0.0029%
demolirati ‘to demolish’ 32 0.00267%
pomesti ‘to swipe out’ 29 0.0024%
srušiti ‘to knock over’ 26 0.00217%
pregaziti ‘to run over; to stomp on’ 22 0.00183%
slomiti ‘to break’ 21 0.0018%
nokautirati ‘to knock out’ 19 0.00158%
razvaliti ‘to destroy; to break’ 10 0.0006%

Table 3. Verbal semi-conventionalized metaphors. Parasynonyms of pobijediti

‘to win’ and their frequencies

No. of Relative
Parasynonyms of ‘match’
tokens frequency
sukob ‘conflict’ 91 0.0076%
sraz ‘collision’ 90 0.0075%
bitka ‘battle’ 81 0.0067%
sudar ‘clash; crash’ 62 0.0051%
okršaj ‘skirmish; clash’ 30 0.0025%

Table 4. Nominal semi-conventionalized metaphors. Parasynonyms of utakmica

‘match’

the kind of force (natural or physical).22 On the other hand nominal expressions
that fall within this category are instantiations of the conceptual metaphor SPORT
IS WAR which points to the interesting distribution between nominal and verbal
expressions as instantiations of the two conceptual metaphors.

22
Although Kövecses (2003) distinguishes between natural and physical force, we do not con-
sider such a distinction relevant for our analysis. Second, we consider that this distinction is
not clear cut and as such not plausible for our research.

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With respect to the analysis of linguistic expressions it has become obvious that the
status of the two conceptual metaphors is not equal in structuring the sports discourse
and thus do not represent in the same way background knowledge representative for
understanding sports in Croatian culture. Therefore, one must regard conceptual
metaphor SPORT IS WAR as more entrenched and more conventional in structuring
sports discourse in Croatian language and culture. Conversely, it tells us that the
conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE has become more and more salient in the way
we conceptualize sports, producing novel metaphorical expressions, thus becoming
more and more entrenched in the sports discourse. Verbs such as savladati ‘to over-
come’ or izbaciti ‘to throw out’ have become conventionalized as to their frequencies
in the SDC (see Table 2) and are also losing the feature of affective markedness.
As we have already mentioned, based on our analysis, nominal metaphorical ex-
pressions are instantiations of the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS WAR. This could be
explained by the fact that the novelty and metaphorical productivity is not exclusively
related to the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE, but to the conceptual metaphor
SPORT IS WAR as well. The category of semi-conventionalized metaphors points to the
fact that once a certain conceptual metaphor is considered to be a fully conventional-
ized structure of knowledge (due to expressions that are instantiated in a certain dis-
course) its productivity and motivating input could be variable. Based on the analysis
of Croatian sports discourse, it has become evident that the conceptual metaphor
SPORT IS WAR motivates new metaphorical expressions only within the nominal lexical
category. Thus semi-conventionalized nominal expressions such as sukob ‘conflict’,
bitka ‘battle’, and okršaj ‘skirmish’ are related to the domain of WAR (on the basis of
their lexicographic definitions), whereas two metaphorical nominal expressions that
are connected to the domain of FORCE are sudar ‘crash’ and sraz ‘collision’.
The reason why we introduced the novel category of semi-conventionalized
metaphorical expressions is that some metaphorical expressions are a constant of
sports discourse, appearing regularly, less frequently than conventionalized meta-
phors and far more frequently than innovative metaphors. Further, they do not
function as key-words. They mostly function as parasynonyms of key-words with
a high degree of affective markedness. The expression potopiti (protivnika) ‘to sink
(an adversary)’ is much more affectively marked than the schematic expression
pobijediti (protivnika) ‘to defeat (an adversary)’. With respect to the individual use
criterion, these expressions are more innovative than conventionalized expressions
but are becoming more and more regular in sports discourse.
What is important about semi-conventionalized metaphors is that the bulk of the
expressions in this category exhibit different patterns of their use in the discourse.
These patterns become pertinent through the comparison of the SDC and a general
corpus. The Croatian National Corpus (CNC) ver. 2.0, a general corpus consisting
of 100 million tokens, is to some degree diachronic23 in comparison to the SDC,
which consists of more recent sports texts. Comparing the two corpora, the difference

The CNC ver. 2.0 consists of texts from 1990 to 2005, which makes our data collected after
23

that period comparable to the CNC in a diachronic way.

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142 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

between the relative frequencies of certain words in the two corpora has become
evident. The relative frequency of the word okršaj ‘skirmish’ in the SDC is 0.0025%
and its relative frequency in the CNC is 0.0011%.24 This statistical data show us that
the expression okršaj ‘skirmish’ has undergone a process of conventionalization.
To be more precise, the noun okršaj ‘skirmish’ appears in 30 citations in every
one million tokens in the SDC, whereas it appears in 11.79 citations in every 1 mil-
lion tokens in the CNC. This data shows that the word okršaj ‘skirmish’ has become
twice as frequent over a period of twenty-five years and thus more conventionalized
and entrenched in our background knowledge.
Verbs such as pomesti ‘to sweep up’ and demolirati ‘to demolish’ exhibit similar
patterns in the discourse formation. The verb pomesti ‘to sweep up’ in the metaphorical
sports sense appears in 50 citations in the CNC. This means that its relative frequency
in the CNC is 0.00005%, which classifies this metaphorical expression as being in the
category of innovative metaphors because its appearance is totally insignificant. How-
ever, its relative frequency is significantly different in the SDC. In the SDC, its relative
frequency is 0.0024%, which means that it has become more conventionalized than
it was in the CNC. This means that the frequency that the verb pomesti ‘to sweep up’
in the CNC is 0.5 citations which is statistically irrelevant data, contrary to the data
obtained by the SDC (where there are 29 citations of the verb pomesti ‘to sweep up’.
The verb demolirati ‘to demolish’ has undergone an even more significant process
of conventionalization. Its relative frequency is 0.0026% in the SDC and 0.000013% in
the CNC. This shows how the verb could be categorized as a highly innovative meta-
phorical expression in the CNC, appearing in a negligible number of citations in every
1 million tokens (0, 13 times), whereas in the SDC it appears in 32 citations. Thus com-
parison of the general and specialized corpora gives us very precise evidence of how
a metaphorical expression became more conventionalized over twenty-five years.
Semi-conventionalized metaphors exhibit some interesting features with respect
to qualitative data as well. They function mutually as parasynonyms and in relation to
some conventionalized metaphorical expressions in the sports discourse. As seen
in the examples in tables 3 and 4, most of the lexemes have very similar meanings
with different affective markedness and can be replaced by one another in the same
context. In other words, a speaker can choose one or the other as part of his own
stylistic motivation. For example, when talking about a match between two teams
or players, a speaker can report the outcome of the game with various lexemes, e.g.
(2) Ljubo srušio Nadala (SDC, www.vecernji.hr)
‘Ljubo knocked down Nadal’ (tennis),
(3) Lyon razbio Bordeaux (SDC, www.vecernji.hr)
‘Lyon smashed Bordeaux’ (football),
(4) Milan potopio Genovu (SDC, www.jutarnji.hr)
‘Milan sank Genoa’ (football).

24
This is the relative frequency of the word okršaj used exclusively in sports discourse in the
general corpus. The method was to manually separate meanings related to sports from those
related to other domains.

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These can be freely replaced with one another and still the main meaning of defeat
will be properly denoted, e.g.
(5) Milan zaustavio / slomio / potopio / nokautirao Genovu
‘Milan stopped / broke / sank / knocked out Genoa’.
The choice seems to be left to the speaker, as he can choose from a set of parasyn-
onymous lexemes with more or less the same denotational meaning. It could be
noticed that they are affectively marked when compared to the affectively neutral
conventionalized expressions pobijediti ‘to win’ and poraziti ‘to defeat’, e.g.
(6) Milan porazio Genovu
‘Milan defeated Genoa’
since these say nothing about the gravity of the defeat itself as seen through the
eyes of the speaker. The same is true of the nominal expressions sukob ‘conflict’,
sraz ‘collision’, bitka ‘battle’, and okršaj ‘skirmish’, which are parasynonyms to the
word utakmica ‘match’.

5.4.  Innovative metaphors

The term innovative metaphor refers to a metaphorical expression based on a con-
ventionalized conceptual metaphor, in our case SPORT IS WAR and SPORT IS FORCE.
Innovative metaphors have extremely low frequencies, appearing less than 10 times
in the SDC, and are examples of the creative, individual use of language by the
speaker. Because of this, they have the highest degree of affective markedness.
Within the category of innovative metaphors we find expressions such as otpu-
hati ‘to blow away’, torpedirati ‘to torpedo’, and the verb razvaliti ‘to ruin’, which
appears 10 times in the SCD. Therefore, the latter could be considered as a peripheral
member between semi-conventionalized and innovative metaphors. The expres-
sions otpuhati ‘to blow away’ and razvaliti ‘to ruin’ are related to the conceptual
metaphor SPORT IS FORCE, whereas the expression torpedirati ‘to torpedo’ is related
to the domain of WAR, expressing in its literal sense the way a certain weapon is
used to defeat an enemy.
An interesting property of innovative metaphors in sports discourse that should
be pointed out is the fact that very often these expressions are complex, and are pro-
duced either by combining novel metaphorical expressions from both conceptual
metaphors or by introducing new elements into the utterance. The following exam-
ples will illustrate the way in which innovative metaphors as complex instantiations
are produced in the sports discourse:
(7) Amerikanci su Kanađanima bacili rukavicu uraganskom prvom trećinom protiv
Finaca (SDC, www.vecernji.hr)
‘The Americans threw down the glove before the Canadians with a hurricane-like
first third against the Finns’,
(8) Branitelj naslova maršira do finala (SDC, www.jutarnji.hr)
‘The defender of the title marches to the final’,

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144 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

(9) Igra Danaca je kao mlin koji melje (SDC, www.sportskenovosti.hr)

‘The Danes’ game is like a grinding mill’.

Example (7) is a combination of two differently motivated metaphorical expressions.

The first part is the existing idiomatic metaphor baciti (INF) rukavicu rukavicu
‘to throw down the glove’ not connected to any specific type of discourse but to
the more general everyday use of language, although it must be noted that it also
originally relates to the domain of WAR. The second, uraganska prva trećina ‘hurri-
cane-like first third’ is directly based on the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE,
as represented by the force of the hurricane, i.e. natural force. To use hurricanes to
specify the type of strength involved in the game is an innovative way of talking
about the match in itself. The innovative metaphorical expression is thus a combi-
nation of an existing metaphor (baciti rukavicu ‘to throw down the glove’) intro-
duced into sports discourse in a novel way and a metaphorical expression based
on a conceptual metaphor already present in the sports discourse but instantiating
a novel concept: a hurricane.
Example (8) is a combination of an existing conventionalized metaphor in the
sports discourse branitelj naslova ‘the defender of the title’, which is combined in
a new way with the expression marširati ‘to march’. The literal sense of the verb
is related to the domains of MOVEMENT and ARMY because it refers to a special,
brusque, energetic way in which an army moves. In sports discourse this verb is
a novel metaphorical expression and thus introduces some new meanings and new
ways of understanding sports.
Example (9) is a case of a purely individual introduction of elements from gen-
eral language use which changes their meaning simply because of their placement
in a discourse which they are not normally a part of. They are still not randomly
selected because their understanding in this context is based on and motivated by
the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE, in this case the strength being the force
of grinding.
These examples show us how novel expressions can be drawn into a discourse
from: (a) already existing conceptual metaphors or (b) other domains that are periph-
erally related to existing conceptual metaphors (e.g. the verb marširati ‘to march’).

6.  Some concluding remarks

The main goal of our research was to show how Conceptual Metaphor Theory could
be integrated into discourse analysis and what it can reveal about the way speakers
structure discourse. We focused on sports discourse for two reasons: (1) sports are
highly metaphorically understood and (2) sports are commonly used as a source
domain for understanding other concepts; therefore, we wanted to conduct a research
to see what domains mostly serve as source domains in understanding sports.
The theoretical framework used for this research was in correlation with Ma-
linowski’s (1923) distinction between context of situation and context of culture,

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as well as Lakoff’s (1992) statement that speakers understand every situation meta-
phorically and accordingly have an ability to communicate about this situation using
different linguistic expressions. Our analysis showed that the two most prominent
conceptual metaphors used in understanding sports are SPORT IS WAR and SPORT
IS FORCE because most of the metaphorical expressions found in sports discourse
are instantiations of these two metaphors. However, corpus based analysis showed
that these two metaphors, although prominent, are not entrenched in speakers’
background knowledge to the same degree. This statement was enabled by using
corpus based analysis.
Implementation of corpus based analysis of sports discourse appeared to be very
useful in pointing to some new evidence in the way conceptual metaphors participate
in the formation of a discourse as part of background knowledge. Our approach
to corpus-based analysis was somewhat different from already-existing research
(cf. Cameron and Deignan 2003; Charteris-Black 2004; Deignan 2005), since we
used a specialized digitalized corpus consisting of more than 1 million tokens for
discourse analysis. Corpus analysis based on the SDC pointed to some interesting
evidence on how metaphorical expressions are used when communicating about
a certain situation. Unlike Deignan (2005), we used a relative frequency approach to
show the number of times a certain metaphorical expression appears in relation
to the absolute number of tokens in a corpus. This provides evidence of the repre-
sentation of metaphorical expressions in (sports) discourse.
This enabled us then to propose a modified classification of metaphors with
semi-conventionalized metaphors as an intermediate category. The three criteria
used in the classification of metaphorical expressions are characterized as quantita-
tive and qualitative but are regarded as a coherent, inseparable group. Frequency
strongly correlates with the other two qualitative criteria. This means that expres-
sions with the highest frequency function as key-words of sports discourse, lacking
affective markedness.
The category of semi-conventionalized metaphors was introduced into the con-
tinuum from conventionalized to innovative metaphors because, based on our
analysis, it has become evident that there is a set of metaphorical expressions that
differ from both conventionalized and innovative metaphors.
Furthermore, with respect to two principal conceptual metaphors that struc-
ture the background knowledge of sports in Croatian culture, it has become clear
that they do not participate in the same way in the structuring of sports discourse.
Firstly, metaphorical expressions related to the conceptual metaphor SPORT IS FORCE
exhibit lower frequency than expressions related to the conceptual metaphor SPORT
IS WAR. Secondly, they function as parasynonyms either of some conventional meta-
phors (mostly to the verb pobijediti ‘to win’) or of each other.
Innovative metaphors are expressions that are statistically irrelevant in a corpus
exhibiting a high degree of the speaker’s individual and creative use. In sports dis-
course they are often complex metaphorical expressions structured from convention-
alized metaphors and completely innovative metaphorical expressions sometimes
related to less entrenched domains.

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146 IDA  RAFFAELLI, DANIELA KATUNAR

The proposed analysis showed some aspects of metaphorical discourse for-

mation that are in high correlation with Lakoff’s (1990) assertions. It gives some
new empirically (statistically) corroborated evidence on how conceptual meta-
phors, in our case SPORT IS WAR and SPORT IS FORCE, structure the speaker’s back-
ground knowledge about a certain situation (sports within the Croatian speech
community), what their instantiation are, and how they function in structuring
(sports) discourse.
As we mentioned before, we consider this kind of analysis based on the SDC
approach suitable for the analysis of any other kind of discourse. This approach
thus paves the way for further anthropological, linguistic, and sociological re-
search stemming from discourse analysis.

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