Metaphorical nominations of agents of sports event in Russian sporting media

Studying the metaphors is traditionally connected with studying of literature, but as D. Lakoff and M. Johnson stated in their work “Metaphors We Live By”, the use of metaphors isn’t confined only by literary and poetic language. They are used in different spheres of our life, for example in everyday speech and in journalism. It is known that comprehending of a sport competition as a war or a battle leads to such verbal transformation where rivals appear as enemies and enemies at war are called soldiers. Such transformation is regular and is treated as temporal. Different words from the group “enemy” are used to denominate a sporting rival some of which have already lost metaphorical character, for example the word “opponent” has become a regular denomination of an object. Having done the analysis of denominations of the word competitor we state that all metaphorical denominations can be divided into three groups: generalized denominations, collective denominations, isolated denominations.

metaphorical denominations, agent of sporting event, sporting media, sporting discourse, generalized denominations, collective denominations, isolated denominations