“Las sirenas mexicanas” and “Las guerreras del agua”: Metaphors used in digital news from Mexican and Spanish sports newspapers

This article aims to identify the most frequently employed conceptual metaphors in digital newspapers sports articles that are used to conceptualize sports and sportswomen during the 2024 Olympic Games. The corpus consists of 1,411 news written in Spanish extracted from four newspapers: Récord and ESTO from Mexico, and Marca and Mundo Deportivo from Spain. We first identify the conceptual metaphors used in the news and then classify them into metaphorical fields. The discourse-linguistic analysis based on the qualitative data shows that sports and sportswomen are conceptualized through various source domains. With regard to sports, they are mostly conceptualized in terms of SPORTS ARE WAR and SPORTS ARE STORYTELLING in both the Spanish and Mexican corpus. Regarding the representation of women athletes, in both contexts SPORTSWOMEN ARE CHAMPIONS and LEGENDS; however, in Mexico the conceptual metaphor SPORTSWOMEN ARE CHAMPIONS predominates, whereas in Spain SPORTSWOMEN ARE WARRIORS, QUEENS, STARS, MACHINES, or ANIMALS.