When winning goals are scored: Variation in the use of sport metaphors in American and British news discourse

The aim of the present poster is to compare the use of sport metaphors around the 2022 FIFA World Cup in spoken and written American and British English. Based on the claims of Boers (1999), my hypothesis is that there would be differences between (1) various the number of sports metaphors used during the competition and the periods before and after it, (2) between the American and the British subcorpora and (3) between the spoken and the written subcorpo-ra. The 3 time periods examined were 3 weeks in September 2002, 3 weeks during the champi-onship, and 5 weeks a month and a half after the event. The corpus (450, 000 words in 9 subcor-pora) consists of transcripts of TV news programmes and newspaper articles. The USAS Seman-tic Tagger was used to identify the sport metaphors which were then analysed and categorized according to the subcorpora they belong to. The findings corroborate the first hypothesis, since the frequency of sport metaphors was the highest during the event in both American and Brit-ish sources. There were no significant differences between American and British subcorpora, or between spoken and written data.Key words:sports metaphor; news discourse; entrenched embodiment; variation; corpus analy-sis; semantic tagging.