Conceptual Metaphor in Saudi Football News: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Headlines Published in Arriyadiyah in the 1990s and 2022–2024

Metaphors in non-literary writing give a sincere reflection of thought and culture. However, recent studies on conceptual metaphor have addressed its use in blogs and newspapers to describe harsh times or negative things (i.e., obesity, cancer, COVID-19, etc.). Thus, this study aims to explore how Saudi journalists conceptualize football in news headlines drawn from a Saudi sports newspaper, Arriyadiyah, since football is considered a widely popular, entertaining game in Saudi Arabia. The Pragglejaz Group’s identification procedure of metaphorical use was employed to identify words and expressions embodying metaphors in 300 headlines. The theoretical framework known as the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) was also utilized to facilitate qualitative analysis. Further, this study is quantitative and diachronic based on two time periods (i.e., the late 1990s and 2022–2024). Results show that a variety of source domains have been employed, especially in headlines of the 1990s, to depict football. For Saudi journalists, football is not only war. Moreover, the diachronic analysis of headlines indicates that Saudi journalists have started to view football from an aesthetic perspective. Additionally, in headlines of the 1990s, Saudi journalists borrowed a few linguistic expressions from the political and social news trending in the 1980s and 1990s. The study has important implications for scholars, as headlines reflect political, social, and cultural changes. Hence, it would be insightful if researchers examined how conceptual metaphors pertaining to football occur in clusters drawn from different source domains and how this contributes to discourse coherence.