metaphor in tennis reports网球赛事报道中的隐喻

DOI 10.1515/text-2012-0033 Text&Talk 2012; 32(6): 703 –726
Rosario Caballero
The role of metaphor in tennis reports and forums
Abstract: The present paper describes the role of metaphor in the commentary generated after Wimbledon’s 2008 final and articulated in two genres within tennis discourse: post-match reports and the online forums opened after them. The starting assumption is that metaphor is sensitive to the discourse context(s) where it is used, and should be approached accordingly. In this regard, genre provides a good vantage point to gain insight into how metaphors are used and, more interestingly, enriched, re-elaborated, and, presumably, entrenched within a given community through repeated use. By focusing on the role of metaphor in discussing such engaging topics as a tennis match and the players in it, the paper attempts to shed some light into the empathetic and evaluative potential of meta-phor as a discourse strategy as well as the importance of communicative interac-tion and language in the elaboration, expansion, and entrenchment of certain metaphors in discourse communities such as the one built around tennis. Keywords: metaphor; sports media genres; evaluation; metaphor expansion.
Rosario Caballero: Departamento de Filología Moderna, Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Avda. Camilo Jose Cela s/n, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain.
E-mail: MRosario.Caballero@uclm.es
1 I ntroduction
On 7 July 2008, Rafael Nadal won his first Wimbledon title in a match that lasted nearly five hours and glued 13.1 million spectators to their TV sets in the United Kingdom alone. Like many other fans, I watched the match and re-lived it through the abundant literature on what is regarded as one of the greatest Wimbledon fi nals ever. Its quality and impact in the tennis world is suggested by reference to the match as “battle royal,” “clash of titans,” or “the changing of the guard” – all of them unmistakably metaphorical.
Here I explore the role of metaphor to comment upon this match in the tennis community. Most data come from tennis reports retrieved from Wimbledon’s o fficial site, online tennis and general sports sites, and newspapers. Since reports
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are often accompanied by a forum where readers discuss the topics dealt with by journalists, I compiled a corpus of 11 discussions after the same number of reports in the first corpus. Because metaphorical language occurs abundantly in both genres, a combined analysis was regarded as the best way to gain insights into the role of metaphor in the co-construction of a tennis match by the journalists cover-ing the event and their readers.
Reports and their corresponding forums are interesting objects of inquiry both as discourse artifacts and sources of metaphorical data. Thus, although sports reports are devoted to providing a post-match commentary, fans seldom read them in order to obtain information about what happened. Rather, they read reports in order to relive the match and compare their impressions with those of the experts – a vicarious and highly emotional experience that often involves us-ing metaphors similar to those found in the journalists’ texts. The following posts from a forum on illustrate the readers’ interaction with and in the genre:
(1) [Journalist’s name] some of the pieces you’ve penned about [Nadal] lately
have left me angry and defensive. this one, on the contrary, brought tears to my eyes. you captured the occasion, you evoked the emotion, you did per-fectly right by your protagonist, and i thank you.
(2) I know I promised myself I wouldn’t read the press, but I’m a glutton for pun-
ishment.
(3) C ertainly, I wouldn’t change the ‘Fed Reign Over’ storylines but it might call
into question the crowning of Nadal as the new king.
Here tennis fans acknowledge their interaction with the report genre (1), empa-thetically react against the literature generated by the match (2), and use similar metaphorical language to the one found in reports (3).
Of course, this author–reader interaction is also afforded by conventional print media, usually in the form of letters. What makes online reports and the forums after them particularly interesting is that the interaction is faster and more dynamic: the comments above were posted within the hour of publish-ing the report, which may have an impact on how metaphor is interpreted and exploited by its readers. By including forums in my analysis, then, I not only de-scribe how tennis is metaphorically construed or how such views are fed to tennis fans, but I also attempt to gain some insight into how and why certain metaphors are disseminated, re-elaborated, and, presumably, entrenched in the tennis c ommunity.
Metaphor in tennis 705 The paper is organized as follows: after surveying the literature on sports metaphors, I describe the genres and methodology used to explore tennis meta-phors. This is followed by a description of the metaphors in my data and a discus-sion of how they are used by journalists and their audience.
2 S port and metaphor
Sport has drawn the attention of scholars from disciplines such as sociology, a nthropology, and cultural studies, all of which have stressed its impact on con-temporary society and its role in promoting social values like perseverance, h onor, courage, etc. Sport is also a domain of experience highly accessible and intelligible and, hence, is often invoked in our metaphorical construal of various life spheres. For instance, scholars have described the persuasive role of sports metaphors in politicians’ dealing with such controversial issues as war (Jansen and Sabo 1994; Chilton 1996) and party and national policies (Semino and Masci 1996; Gidengil and Everitt 1998) or the cultural and ideological implications of sports metaphors in the construal of minorities and gender (Gannon 2001). In these studies popular sports like football, soccer, or boxing are seen as reflect-ing sociocultural practices, hence the array of issues articulated by them, e.g., the masculinization of certain spheres of society or the construction of social i dentities.
Interestingly, studies where sport itself is metaphorized bring forth similar concerns. For instance, Mitrano (1999) describes how metaphors equating loss with death and divorce or likening a team’s owner to a prostitute reveal the emo-tional bond between people and their hockey team, and how those metaphors contribute to building their sense of empowerment and self-esteem. However, there are few studies exploring the metaphors involved in sports performance per se, and these usually focus on mass sports such as football, soccer, or basketball (Kellett 2002; Nordin 2008; Vierkant 2008) rather than tennis – still regarded as a somewhat elitist sport.
Among the scant research on tennis metaphors, we find Charteris-Black (2004) and Schmidt (2004). The latter explores the metaphors in the spoken com-mentary of the Official Wimbledon Film summarizing the 2002 event, particularly tennis tournaments are routes you walk along and tennis is war in-stantiated by expressions like advance, (be)back on track, defense, or warrior.1
1 small capitals indicate conceptual metaphors, and their verbal instantiations are presented in italics. These appear within double quotes when belonging to the examples under discussion.
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Charteris-Black (2004: 113–134) describes how sport is a struggle for sur-vival, instantiated by battle, fight, kill, or war, is used in newspaper reports deal-ing with soccer, rugby, cricket, and tennis. This is presented as a higher order conceptual key subsuming the generic metaphor sport is war and the more spe-cific football is war, tennis is war, etc. These metaphors are explored from a critical discourse analysis, and discussed as helping create and reinforce social systems based upon competition.
Charteris-Black’s emphasis on the textual and rhetorical dimension of meta-phor reflects scholars’ growing interest in the linguistic aspects of metaphor in contrast to the strong cognitive bias adopted in cognitive metaphor theory (here-after, CMT) after the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Of course, describing how a metaphor like tennis tournaments are journeys underlies the construal of such goal- and stage-oriented events is important. However, explaining how p eople actually use this metaphor in discourse interaction requires paying a ttention to how it is textually instantiated in agreement with a number of con-textual factors. Unfortunately, the situatedness of metaphor is often obscured by the formulaic notation of metaphorical mappings. This is addressed in Sec-tion 4.
3 T ennis reports and forums
In order to explore the role of metaphor in tennis discussions, I built two corpora. The first is an 80-text report corpus (88,310 words) retrieved on 7–8 July from
– Wimbledon’s official site ()
– online tennis sites (, , , , , )
– general sports sites (, , , , /sport2/hi/tennis)
– newspapers (The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Mail)
The forum corpus consists of 11 forum discussions (173,522 words) retrieved on 7 –10 July from , , and Tennis 606 on the BBC sports site.
The report–forum combination is interesting genre- and metaphor-wise. In-deed, both genres may illustrate what discourse analysts variously call genre s ystems (Bazerman 1994), sets (Hyland 2007; Paltridge 2007), or colonies (Bhatia 2000), i.e., the set of genres that are closely related in the discourse practices of a
Metaphor in tennis 707 given community. The system of genres pivoting on a tennis match comprises pre-match predictions and their corresponding forums, the live commentary (TV or radio), as-it-happens (online) narratives, post-match interviews, newspaper re-ports, and online blogs and forums. This organic view of genres is particularly evident in electronic media, where genres are often linked to the extent that their boundaries are often blurred – which suggests that what happens in one genre needs to be set against those other genres related to it.
3.1 T ennis reports
Reports are written by specialized journalists who assess tennis matches for an audience which, in general, does not approach the texts for the sake of informa-tion. Put differently, although reports necessarily incorporate a narrative of what happened at a particular time and location, they are an intrinsically exegetical, as opposed to factual and “objective,” and vicarious discourse practice.
As to the genre’s rhetorical structure, the reports in the corpus illustrate two types. The first follows the typical format of media texts, and opens with catchy headlines and leads fulfilling an informative plus evaluative role, i.e., economi-cally blend the who, what, when,and where questions of a tennis match, and elaborates the why and how in the main text. Thus, after providing the result of a match in the headline and/or lead, a typical report usually expands this informa-tion in the first paragraphs of the main text. This is followed by a more detailed recount of the players’ performance plus a description of the atmosphere of the stadium or any other noteworthy information, and sometimes the post-match r eactions of the players. Finally, the texts close with an evaluative paragraph which usually echoes the assessment articulated in the headline and/or lead (see also Laybutt 2009). Table 1 shows a report from The Times.
Reports of the second type resemble newspaper features in that they provide a longer and more personal narrative of the match at issue. These may appear in the newspapers where the shorter reports are published (usually shortly after re-ports written immediately after the match) or on sports Web sites. Although the basic information structure does not change, the texts are less constrained struc-turally: authors organize them in agreement with their personal liking and, inter-estingly, their audience’s, which makes it difficult to abstract a “stable” common textual pattern. Reports of this kind are a regular feature of tennis Web sites: for instance, offers them under a section called Racquet Reaction and in two regular columns or blogs written by specialized journalists and called Con-crete Elbow and Tennisworld, respectively.
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3.2 F orums
Forums after sports reports are interactive spaces where fans respond to the
j ournalists’ commentary, provide their own views on the match under review, and even post articles dealing with the same topic. In order to participate in such forums, readers fill in a dialog box inviting them to “Leave a Comment” after pro-viding a name and, sometimes, an e-mail address.
Posters are a multifarious collective regarding age and gender – the number of female posters contradicting folk views of sport as a masculine affair. More-over, although posters often use a pseudonym, eventually they get to know each other, bonds are created, and there is an unmistakable feeling of “belonging” – as suggested by a greeting such as “Mornin’ Tribe!” from a well-known tennis pun-
Headline
Hero emerges from shadows after epic final Opening paragraph
Had there ever been a men’s final such as this, the longest in history in this cherished place? The two best players in the world went at each other hammer and tongs, spikes and staffs, and it was Nadal [. . .] who took the most precarious walk of his life, having beaten Roger Federer, the
five-times champion, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7 in four hours and 48 minutes of such drama, such raw emotion, in such trying circumstances, that this was heroism of a glorious kind.
Comments on players (reaction after winning, players’ quotes; 4 paragraphs)Nadal became the first man since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to win [. . .] You could only feel for Federer [. . .]
Narrative of match (8 paragraphs)
The rain breaks seemed to come at advantageous times for the Swiss, leading 5-4 in the third set when Nadal had been within one shot of being 5-3 ahead himself [. . .]
Final paragraph: Closing evaluation
Federer could not resist the onslaught,
succumbing in the fifteenth game when he pushed a forehand long. Nadal served for the match,
missed match point No 3, but steadied and enticed a forehand error by Federer on the fourth. All hail Rafa the Remarkable.
Key moments and statistics (Optional)Table 1: Report’s structure
Metaphor in tennis 709 dit, and the frequent insertion of tennis-unrelated, personal comments when dis-cussing matches and players. Finally, because of their very nature and purpose, forums do not follow a pre-established rhetorical pattern. Thus, after the journal-ist’s report, the forum is open and readers post at will.
4 M ethodology and data
My view of metaphor follows the standard CMT definition of metaphor as map-ping knowledge from one domain of experience (the source) onto a different d omain (the target) which is construed in terms of the former. This conceptual mapping may be linguistically realized in various ways.
In order to decide whether an expression is metaphorical or not, I consider whether it illustrates any domain incongruity in reference or attribution – both often suggested by incongruous collocation, as in a “cantering service hold” where a word typically used about horses like cantering is used to qualify a tennis game. Put differently, a given expression was considered metaphorical whenever it involved the understanding of and/or reference to any aspect of a tennis match, tournament, or player in terms belonging to an experiential domain other than tennis. This is the case of defeats described as the reign falling, matches referred to as battles, shots qualified as spitting cobras, and players described as steeple-chase stallions.
The metaphorical data in the corpus were then classified according to the metaphorical source domains. For instance, terms such as battle, surrender, weapon, or soldier were tagged as instantiating the metaphor tennis is war, and king, dethrone, regime change, usurp, or new sheriff in town were tagged as draw-ing upon authority or power. A look at the latter terms, however, reveals a char-acteristic of many expressions in the corpus: although they are all informed by an authority “general” metaphor, they specify it in particular ways. Accordingly, I grouped my data in several metaphorical themes, and further decomposed these into the more specific metaphors suggested by their instantiations (e.g., players are rulers suggested by new sheriff in town or tournaments/titles are k ingdoms illustrated by a verb like dethrone).2
A final issue concerns expressions that could instantiate more than one meta-phor. For instance, “The baton passes” opening one report may exemplify the authority theme (baton as a symbol of office or authority), a race metaphor
2 Semino (2008) uses scenarios to refer to figurative schemas more specific than metaphorical domains, and Charteris-Black (2004) distinguishes between lower-order conceptual metaphors and higher-order conceptual keys.
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(baton as the stick passed among relay runners), or a music metaphor (baton as the wand used by orchestra conductors). Common to all three terms is the “command” meaning of those three scenarios, which means that they are fully compatible with the topic introduced, i.e., the end of Federer’s supremacy in Wimbledon at Nadal’s hands. Simply put, the metaphorical expression is suc-cessful discourse-wise regardless of the formula used to classify it. However, since researching metaphor requires classifying and formalizing data, I included it within the authority set as the remaining text elaborated upon this metaphor (e.g., the report ends with “For now, while Federer tends to his wounds, he must salute the new emperor”).
4.1 M etaphorical data in reports and forums
The corpus yielded 3,723 metaphorical instances, 2,295 from the report corpus (61.6%) and 1,428 from forum discussions (38.4%). The largest number in both illustrates motion, violence, and authority themes and their corresponding metaphors, as summarized in Table 2.
The texts also abound with language that portrays matches, games, sets, and, above all, points as three-dimensional, physical things. This is recurrent in ten-nis discourse at large, and involves such conventional expressions as hold, break, save, or drop serve, as well as the more innovative grab, hand, seize, snatch, find, throw/chuck away, or steal. All of them are used to express points, games, and sets “gained” or “lost” in a match, as shown in the following:
(4) F ederer, who had not dropped a set before the final, had to fight back from two
sets down and saved three match points.
(5) F ederer handed Nadal a third set point. This time Nadal found the first serve
[. . .] to collect the opening set.
(6) A fter chucking away a 3-0 lead in the second set, it looked as though [Federer]
did not even want to be on Centre Court.
Players themselves may also be presented as inanimate things:
(7) F ederer [. . .] was stretched to five sets by Nadal.
(8) A s Nadal took the second set, the Fed Express was heading to Heathrow A irport
for the last plane to Basel.
Metaphor in tennis 711
Themes Metaphors Total TR/TF% TR/TF motion tournaments are paths/routes/
itineraries
journey, route, road, trajectory, way,
destination
winning is progression in space
advance, sneak, race, sprint, progress, roll,
wobble
779/58934%/41.2%
violence tennis is war
battle, war, gun, surrender, combat, knight,
weapons
tennis is struggle for survival
annihilation, dead, massacre, succumb,
survive
tennis is a fight
gladiators, street-fighter, duel, tilt, tussle
473/43720.6%/30.6%
3d-things points/sets/games/matches are 3d
entities
bag, collect, drop, earn, erase, grab, hand,
seize, rob
players are machines/vehicles
Fed Express, warranty expire, machine, gain
traction
398/10417.3%/7.3%
authority/ power tennis is a struggle for dominance
changing of guard/regime, shift in
powerbase, rule
players are rulers
new sheriff in town, lord, sultan, dominion
tournaments/titles are kingdoms
reign, (de)throne, majestic, newly-crowned,
king
193/1118.4%/7.8%
arts music, epic, poetry, actors, stage, theatre,
Baryshnikov, balletic, pirouette
129/18 5.6%/1.3%
language answer, splutter, read, lexicon, conversation-
changer
41/10 1.8%/0.7%
sports tennis is boxing
boxers, heavyweights, puncher, thrust &
parry, heavyweight, hook
a match is a race
marathon, the finish line, get back on track,
race, torch
39/12 1.7%/0.8% Table 2: Metaphor in tennis reports (TR) and forums (TF)
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This reified portrayal of players falls into diverse degrees of specificity, from the “malleable,” yet vague view in (7) to the more specific mechanic image in (8) in-stantiating players are vehicles. The humorous, albeit conventional, reference to Federer as Fed Express or Fedex plays with his surname while evoking the
n otions of first-class, speed, and reliability characterizing both a well-known US cargo company and his game style.
In turn, in tennis it is frequent to find backhands, forehands, serves, etc., qualified as vicious , timid , wicked , big , nasty, or ferocious . Such personification cases are used to qualify positively the players’ shots:
Themes Metaphors
Total TR/TF % TR/TF animals territorial, tiger on the prowl, bull, stallion, hound
36/27 1.4%/1.9%religion anoint, gods, cathedral, hallowed, congregation
32/15 1.3%/1%people
tournament/match is a person
brought to his knees, be X games old, genteel, hail
tennis is a person
cruel, stubborn, reign, celebrate the birth, embrace
shots are people timid, vicious, wicked
25/7
1.1%/0.5%
nature players are forces of nature
cyclone, a force of nature, hurricane match is a natural phenomenon
storm, sea-change, cyclonic, electricity 23/81%/0.6%
mythology colossus, giants, Achilles, Pantheon 17/80.7%/0.6%magic magic, genie out of the bottle, spellbinding
14/6
0.6%/0.4%miscellanea
heat: furnace of competition, summer-swelter
craftsmanship: carve out/warp point, carve gem
sound: booming serve, wail/rattle points light: Fed’s tennis flickered, Nadal illuminated tennis
96/76
4.2%/
5.3%
total
2,295/1,428
100%
Table 2 (continued)
(9) I just can’t comprehend why Fed doesn’t use his vicious back hand slice more
often
(10) N adal serving 2-1 bends a nasty lefty serve for an ace
Personification may also involve more innovative, rhetorically charged expres-sions often concerned with Wimbledon itself:
(11) W hile Nadal collapsed onto the court after winning his fourth match point,
it was the House of Federer that was brought to its knees after a glorious five-year run.
(12) R ather than mocking Wimbledon, as many a claymeister has done, the Span-
iard embraced it.
Of course, some of the metaphors in the corpus also occur in genres other than reports or forums within tennis discourse. What is interesting, however, is the particular ways in which such metaphors appear in the corpora under explora-tion, which points to the – somewhat neglected – context-boundedness of meta-phor and the weight of background information in exploring – and interpreting – it.
Thus, Wimbledon is the classiest and, certainly, most traditional and code-governed Grand Slam in the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) calendar. This was also the first time after Borg in 1980 that a player won Roland Garros and Wimbledon in succession. Moreover, this – and the previous two – finals con-fronted two players considered to be the best on clay and grass: the five-time Wimbledon champion Federer versus the four-time Roland Garros champion Nadal. The latter’s victory not only ended Federer’s dominance on grass, but also provoked a change in the two top positions in the ATP ranking – held by these two players since 2006. Most metaphors in the corpus reflect this situation in various ways.
5 C onstruing Wimbledon’s final through metaphor
A cursory look at the media coverage of Wimbledon’s final shows the repeated reference to the match as a marathon and a battle and the unanimous qualifica-tion of the result as the dethroning of the king of grass. Put differently, the com-
mentary on the match relies heavily on the motion, violence, and authority/ power themes.
5.1 m otion metaphors
motion motivates the largest number of metaphorical data in the corpora, from conventional tennis terms (e.g., ATP race, tournament draw) to descriptions of tournaments as if they were roads or paths along which players advance (in)to different stages (rounds) until reaching their goal (winning). This dynamic ren-dering relies upon expressions such as on course, make it as far as, stand in one’s way, progress, journey, or reach, as well as the more salient and suggestive instan-tiations shown below:
(13) [Federer] showed little resemblance to the revered gentleman whose six-
match journey to the final had seemed but a pleasant stroll through an English country garden.
(14) S o long as Nadal is still standing, though, it’ll be a long slog for everyone else.
(15) [T]he top two players in the world [. . .] made a mutual march toward history:
Federer was bidding to break [Borg’s] record [. . .], while Nadal was aiming to become the first man since Borg in 1980 to sweep Roland Garros and Wim-bledon in succession.
(16) T he Spaniard now is King. His quest achieved, he drops limp to the hallowed
sod.
Nouns like stroll, slog, march, and quest go beyond expressing the notion of win-ning as spatial progression; rather, their use is contextually relevant. Thus, c omparing Federer’s “journey” to a “pleasant stroll” in (13) alludes to his easy, “leisure” way of winning. This ease component is absent when discussing Nadal in (14), a player renowned for his stamina and relentlessness. Hence, defeating him is a “slog” rather than a pleasant walk. In turn, “made a mutual march” in (15) alludes to the implications of winning Wimbledon for both players – elaborated in the co-text. Together with stressing the purposeful and steady progress of both players’ careers, the expression evokes notions of warfare – a metaphor thor-oughly exploited in tennis commentary. Finally, although the main sense of “quest”is ‘search’ or ‘pursuit’, it also refers to knight expeditions in medieval r omances. The use of a term packed with adventure, religion, and chivalry con-notations is relevant in that it conjures up Nadal’s efforts and history on grass –
including his two previous defeats to Federer in Wimbledon – while paying an oblique tribute to the noble, “knightly” status of Wimbledon.
Many motion instantiations are similarly context-bound. Thus, although wins, losses, and partial match results are often reported by means of be+ p ar t icle/phrase combinations or verbs like lead, fall, or hold, these appear hand in hand with more salient language, as shown in the following examples from tennis forums:
(17) A ll Roger can do is get back on the horse and come out swinging again.
(18) I’m doubly happy [Rafa’s] begun to “branch out” from clay.
(19) R afa didn’t pull Roger off his pedestal; he just climbed up and joined him on it.
Other interesting cases involve manner of motion verbs and “way” constructions. The former appear in commentaries like “Federer cruised through his service games”, “Nadal galloped to 0-40”, “Federer then slipped to 0-40” or “all credit to Nadal for keeping his nerve despite wobbling in the 4th set”, all of which provide a vivid rendering of what happened in the final. In turn, “way” constructions u sually report on Nadal “bludgeon[ing] his way to 5-2 up”, “pummel[ling] his way toward history”, or “blast[ing]his way to a commanding 5-2 lead”, whereas F ederer is presented as “serv[ing] his way out of trouble”, “claw[ing] his way back from two sets down”, or “work[ing] his way back to contention”. These instantia-tions capture the players’ game style and their performance in the match. Thus, verbs like pummel, blast, and bludgeon befit Nadal’s muscular game and high-light his ferocity in the final. In contrast, Federer had to struggle to overcome a two-set deficit (encoded in work and claw) and often relied on his powerful serve to do so (i.e., “served his way out of trouble”). While the expressions are perfectly intelligible for tennis fans, they may not be so for people knowing noth-ing about tennis or this particular match, which stresses the contextual specific-ity of a large amount of the metaphors in the corpus – and, by the same token, any other metaphor.
5.2 v iolence metaphors
Despite views of tennis as a gentlemanly sport, violence is a recurrent theme in tennis discourse: shots are often described as blistering, brutal, or devastating; matches are clashes; and winning is crushing, destroying, or thrashing the oppo-nent. This all-encompassing theme can be broken down into more concrete meta-phors in agreement with the “type” of violence involved.。