The commodification of sport in English sports media: a look through the lens of metaphor
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-3-10
- Pages
- 162-177
Abstract
The article focuses upon axiological dimension of “commercial” metaphors in sports media. Drawing on historical corpora as well contemporary textual data we demonstrate that analogies from trade and economics have been extensively exploited in sports news discourse since the beginning of professional sport institutionalization. Qualitative distinctiveness of social and cultural relations that mean to be realized in sports appears to have been brought to quantifiable rational parameters — with money as their universal equivalent. Pragmatically motivated metonymic shift “sportsman → professional function” results in the multifaceted “sportsman” concept being reduced to a set of numerically verifiable professional traits, thus equating a sportsman to a thing — both characterised by “quantifiable” and countable features. In a consumer society, with money being a symbol of all things (S. Moscovici), metonymy undergoes generalisation, giving rise to a “sportsman is a commodity” metaphor. Linguistic instantiations of the latter, dating back to the late XIX — early XX centuries, include collocations of trade-related terms with proper and common names denoting sportsmen (e. g., the sale of players, to buy up players, to trade Rogers Hornsby). Signaling a shift in both lexical valency and meaning such word combinations mark the beginning of the devaluation of the sportsman. Having originated in the speech of American sports managers and club owners, the “sportsman is a commodity” metaphor has acquired cultural prominence, becoming integral to Anglo-American sports discourse. In modern media it is distinguished by a high degree of conceptual and linguistic detail and serves as an explanatory model structuring common perception of most socially significant aspects in professional sportsmen lives. In speech “commercial” metaphors vary from occasional vivid, often striking creative tropes to multiple conventionalized clichés. Used with consistent regularity, they serve as linguistic manifestation of the hyper-commodification of professional sport, which in the global media entertainment industry has been largely deprived of its original — ideal — axiological foundation.
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